 This is Dr. Gerald Stucca, Extension Veterinarian and Livestock Stewardship Specialist. I just want to talk to you about some calf health issues for 2021 and perhaps even leading over into 2022. As all of you are aware, we had a pretty significant drought this summer and had some range recently that provided some regrowth. But when you have drought and drought stress forages, it does lead to some things that need some attention. One of those being trace minerals. Sometimes our drought stress forages might be a little bit short of some of the trace minerals that are very important for the function of the animal and for the immune response of the animal, things such as copper and zinc and selenium and those trace minerals. But probably more importantly, sometimes these drought stress forages can be short of vitamin A. As most of you know, cattle get their vitamin A through the consumption of green forages. When there isn't any green forages, they don't get vitamin A. And if they've come through a drought stress summer, and now let's say they're out on corn stalks, which is not going to contain much vitamin A because they're not green forages at this stage. So we just need to be aware of some of the deficiencies that can be in our calves this fall that may not have been there previously. And we got to make sure that we're providing trace mineral supplementation through the mineral. It can be free choice, can be force fed in a total mixed ration. And that has adequate levels of vitamin A in the trace mineral package as well. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin, but that can decay over time, especially even in our green forages. If I've got carryover hay for one year to the next, there's a very good chance that that carryover hay that's more than a year old is going to be inadequate in terms of its vitamin A levels. So please pay attention to trace minerals in vitamin A this fall and certainly this winter. You know, as to be expected with drought, we're probably going to have lower weaning weights. Lower weaning weights are as a result of certainly lower milk production by the dam and also less quality forage for the calf that gets to be at an age where that forage is providing quite a bit of that intake and projected weight gains for those calves. I just want to spend just a little bit of time talking about expected what I expect for BRDC. BRDC is an acronym for bovine respiratory disease complex. And what I'm portraying here is that if I'm raising calves on my home ranch, what would I expect to treat? What would I expect the death loss to be from bovine respiratory disease? As you can see from this slide, I expect either zero to one less than 1% mortality and certainly zero to less than 5% morbidity. That should be your expectations with well managed herds provided that you've done some of the things that sometimes need some attention and that leads us into the next bullet point and what is preventable via management. So on this bullet point under then I got BRDC, which stands for bovine respiratory disease complex. We call it complex because it's a little complicated. We have bacteria, we have viruses, we have stressors in the system that leads to calves actually demonstrating clinical signs of respiratory disease. But what I'm getting at is that some of these things are management issue rather than infectious disease issues. So I'll put it this way. If I have a ranch that's got several hunter cows, I'm more than likely going to have several different pastures. When I bring those pastures together at winning time and winning them once, that's what I mean by multiple groups. Now I'm throwing calves together to haven't seen each other since perhaps the calving season or maybe not then. I'm putting together, that's called commingling those cattle. I may or may not have transportation, but I'm certainly going to have a dietary change going from the grass that they're on and the milk that they're being supplied to by their mothers. They may or may not have an address change, probably somewhat because they're going from pasture and in many cases, not all, because sometimes we do have, we can wean calves and pasture right next to their dams, which is for some it goes great for others. Sometimes those calves figure out how to get back to their dams, their mothers without too much trouble. So they might have a little bit of an address change and certainly at this time of the year in October, November, we can have environmental changes. We can have some low lows, some high high steel and some moisture and so sometimes it creates pen conditions that are not conducive to a calf that's trying to handle weaning and handle dietary changes, struggling with mud in the pen and maybe even some wet circumstance getting wet or snow on. So there's a number of stressors that in many cases can be somewhat preventable. I realize it's hard to to address the environmental change. But think about this in a ranch with several hundred cows coming together. I'm going to wean those calves at once and I'm going to put them all together. What might I do to reduce some of that coming like stress that may be there? Well, what I can do if possible is to put the cows in all the cows and calves together in one place and then feed them. Feed them a ration that doesn't have to be a ration that you're necessarily targeting for gain, but certainly targeting so that the calves will eat something and their mother teaches them how to eat what they're eating. And then after a week, let's say two weeks, doing this on a daily basis, those calves know how to eat and they know what they're eating. And so separate the calves at that point, feed them the same ration, so to speak, maybe for a day or two and then make slow changes in that in that ration. That way you avoid that combing stress that gets piled on with weaning at the same time. And much of the issues related to respiratory disease kind of disappear if you can do those things. We still have in terms of calf healthy unexpected. And that would be like one ranch source calf 60 days post weaning with a respiratory disease outbreak. Those things do happen. And I would say that most of the time I can usually identify a ration change, a step up in the amount of energy in that ration. Some other ingredient that's gone in there to cause some digestive upsets that's led ultimately to those calves demonstrating respiratory disease and the clinical science with that. We also can have things that are a little bit out of the ordinary in confined situation. But still calves can can demonstrate and get infected with some of those pink eye organisms, some of those foot rot organisms, and even things like polio, in which case we might need to examine the ration for the level of sulfates in the diet. That seems to be the biggest culprit today as it relates to to polio. Then at the end, we'll talk a little bit about vaccination and how that might be involved in a preventable preventing disease strategy. When I look at these things, and this would be your veterinarian as well. It really helps for us to have a complete history. Have yourself a manager heard person someone else contribute to the history. And that should have a high priority. I want to want to focus on dates. And so some of these things really need to be written down. When do you think it began? When was the first case? When did you combing calves together? How many of you treated? How many of you had to retreat? And unfortunately, how many actually died from respiratory disease in this case? And then the numbers of animals, in terms of animal health, we use a term called case specific rates. That just simply means if I treat 10 animals with an antibiotic, what did I treat them with and what did I treat them for? So if I got 10 out of 100, I treated for respiratory disease and I used antibiotic A. That's a 10% case specific rate due to respiratory disease. Let's start here a little bit and just talk about what does a sick animal look like. And maybe more importantly, we need to know what a well animal looks like in order to determine what a sick animal looks like. So let's just list a couple things on the wellness side. Signs and symptoms of healthy cattle. Well, they should be up eating. They should be bright-eyed. And for those of you that have spent a fair amount of time looking at animals and behavior, you'll know what that bright-eyed comment is referring to. You can see this up in the upper right corner. There's an image there of some black steers and those are bright-eyed cattle. They should have a good hair coat provided they've been in for some time and you haven't shipped them from a geographical location that's a long ways away from you where they may not have enough hair or they've gone from north to south or they got too much hair. But indeed, in terms of wellness, they should have good hair coat. They should groom themselves and others and then they should be curious. Well, it depends on sometimes the disposition or the temperament of these cattle. Sometimes they are curious from a quarter of a mile away, but others should come right up to the bunk and try and figure out who you are. So those are the signs of healthy cattle. When we're dealing with primarily respiratory disease, I think many of us understand what those signs and symptoms are. And so a sign would be like taking a rectal temperature. If I'm taking a rectal temperature, that's an objective measurement that something is going on in that animal, particularly if the temperature is above, let's say, 104. That's an objective sign that that animal is dealing with something and that may need further attention and may actually need treatment. In most cases, the answer to that would be yes. A symptom really refers to another acronym that we've used in the cattle business and that's called ADR, which just means ain't doing right. And for those of you that are looking at this picture, you can see there's at least two animals in here. The one on the left and one on the right that they're certainly ain't doing right. I don't know what the rectal temperatures are, but if I saw those animals in the pen, I'd wonder why I hadn't seen those animals the day before or two days before this particular image. So normal temperature in a calf, it's going to be anywhere from 101.5 up to 103.5. And you know, for many of us when they get to be 103, 103.5 and they're showing some other symptoms besides that temperature, we might consider pulling and treating that animal. So I use these numbers rather loosely, but certainly an animal that's above 103.5 is going to need further attention and likely may need some type of therapy. Remember, there's many reasons why an animal doesn't come to the feed bunk. That's the first thing that we notice, but it's not always disease. It can be the fact that the water's been shut off or there's electricity in the water or they're just shy. And they don't compete very well or there's not enough bunk space for them all to come at the same time. And if those are ruled out, then the final answer might be that they have actually got disease or something wrong. We're not sure exactly. We don't know whether it's viral or bacterial, but there's something that's not right. Just wanted to throw in a kind of a little schematic here, I guess, or an illustration of just the respiratory system. Here we have the trachea and that branches into bronchi or bronchus. And then ultimately you get down to what we call these alveoli. And those are the spaces where oxygen and CO2 are exchanged and where that animal actually picks up enough oxygen for it to survive. So now what I'm showing you is an animal that's been opened up and obviously died from something. And this is the lung tissue on the right. If I go to the right, that's where the head end is of the animal. If I go to the left, that's obviously where the back end is. I got a piece of liver and I got a gallbladder. And then here, you know, I've got some lung tissue here that doesn't look so healthy. Up here, you know, I can find pieces that look a little bit better. So this is somewhat healthy, although not completely. This is lung tissue down here that's in really, really bad shape. And there's not going to be any exchange of oxygen and CO2 in the alveolar spaces in that lung. So that's an animal died of respiratory disease. Here's another one. This one's a little bit different. I don't see really any healthy tissue here at all. You can see this lung that has kind of a nasty color. There might be a few spaces that would look okay. And then I've got a film covering this lung. It's called fibrin. That's an acute phase protein. And it's produced by the animal as an attempt to control that infection, to wall off that infection. If you will, obviously this animal didn't make it either. Back here would be the liver. And then on this end would be the head of that animal. This is a little bit different lesion here or something that causes a lot of breathing in animals. This is what we would call catheteria or necrotic laryngitis. Cavs like this that have a lesion in their voice box are going to make a lot of noise. It doesn't mean they've got lung lesions. It doesn't mean they can't survive. But this is a case where this is going to be very noisy breathing. You'll hear them breathing from a long distance away. And usually those calves outside of this one, obviously, but if you treat them early, they should respond pretty well to that infection. Here's a little different one. This is a viral infection. And what we got here is long tissue, but you can see it's long really hasn't collapsed a great deal. I got little bubbles showing here. Those alboreal or spaces have actually expanded and kind of bubbled to the surface. This is what we would call a BRSV infection, bovine respiratory sensational virus. And the good thing about these viruses like this one, BRSV, we actually can immunize animals against that virus and protect that from clinical disease and from this sort of thing happening. Here's one we don't talk about so much in North Dakota, although we get a few cases now and then. This is called mycoplasmal pneumonia. And I just want to demonstrate here what's going on here. Up here, I got some fairly decent lung tissue. Down here, you can see a kind of a line of demarcation. And then you can see all these little white spots. It almost looks like a pimple that's headed up. These are tiny little abscesses throughout this lung tissue. And that's very indicative of a mycoplasma pneumonia. Mycoplasma is a little bit different organism. We don't have effective vaccines for it. And this is a nasty infection. And sometimes these cattle with mycoplasma pneumonia don't always show you very good clinical science or even for that matter. Not only symptoms of respiratory disease, but sometimes their temperature doesn't come up that high either. It's kind of more of a chronic infection as evidenced by some of these abscesses. One of the nasty things about mycoplasma, it can actually metastasize, if you will, and get to the joints. This is actually a knee joint of a calf. And I got some nasty looking material that are right inside the knee joint. And we would call that a mycoplasmal arthritis condition. Very painful and almost impossible to treat. I wanted to point this out. This is more related to mycoplasma than anything. I'll maybe use a little different color here to just highlight this. So this is groups of calves that were brought in. There was like 60 calves. And what they did with this study, they swabbed it. They took deep nasal swabs every 10 days or so up until they took a day zero, day 10, 21 and 28, 60. I just want to point out what happens with mycoplasma. They had just a few cases when they came in and by day 10, they got 75% of those calves that has mycoplasma. My point is that mycoplasma is one of those organisms that seems to spread really rapidly. So it's an interesting observation. And it's sometimes why in high risk animals, we use antibiotics on arrival to maybe curb that spread as quickly. In fact, this one happens to be antibiotics that were given on arrival. And you can see they eventually get up to 75%, but it's actually by day 21. So it delayed that spread of that disease just a little bit with antibiotics on arrival. The problem with this organism is that we don't have very good vaccines against it. In fact, here's a study showing really no effect at all. They gave it to dairy calves and really the mycoplasma that caused otitis media, which is a ear infection. It was the same for vaccinated calves and for unvaccinated calves. So there was no difference in the overall treatment rate. There was no difference of when it should first showed up, whether they had vaccines or not. And the same issue, not only for ear infections, but for respiratory disease was the same whether they had been vaccinated or not. So it's kind of frustrating that we still don't have a vaccine for mycoplasma with demonstrated efficacy. I want to point this out because this relates back to a slide ahead earlier and that it relates to co-mingling and how oftentimes we miss the impact of co-mingling. We talk about vaccines a lot and vaccines are very important, but we sometimes overlook the co-mingling effect. This happened to be a number of years ago when a colleague of mine sent me an email and this is the history on it. This is at a Georgia bull test station. They had a vaccine protocol that was sent to the bull test years ago. We're incoming bulls. They were vaccinated two to three weeks prior to arrival, which could make sense to build immunity up to a certain level before they come. With IBR, PI3, BRSV, and BVD-1 and 2, which that would be a five-way viral vaccine. They also received manheimia hemolytica, pastorella multacida, and hemoflasomenus along with a seven-way. It's a lot to give them, but they gave it to them two to three weeks prior to arrival. Then a processing that he wasn't quite sure what they got, but they were given boosters at processing, so in other words, when they came. The question, this follow-up question is, there's a little more of the history. Typically processing in is around July 5th, and the bulls are sold around December 7th, within seven to ten days after arrival. There are numerous cases of respiratory disease, which are treated, may be retreated, and the process really runs till late November. So his question was, if the protocol prior arrival and at processing was IN, which means intranasal administered vaccine like TSV2, or we could say IN-4-3, or MerCAS-1 as well, and an intramuscular subcure manheimia hemolytica, pastorella vaccine plus costridial, omitting the hemophilus, would there be less BRD? I would appreciate your advice. The vaccine in this case had nothing to do at all with the respiratory disease that they're seeing. What we're dealing with here is the impact of commingling. Now we're putting both together. I don't care what you vaccinate them with. When you don't deal with the commingling, you're going to have respiratory disease. So sometimes we overstate the importance of vaccines. They're important. But tweaking a vaccine protocol is not going to be the answer, especially in this type of situation we've got overwhelming. And then this final slide. Prevent the preventable as it regards nutrition to avoid some of that commingling effect on calves raised on the same ranch. Feed all the groups of cows and calves together prior to weaning. Maybe it's a week, maybe it's two weeks. Sometime needs to expire feeding those cows and calves together to remove the effect of commingling. And then feed a very similar ration at weaning. Once you've taken the calves away from the cows, feed a similar ration and make those changes gradually. Avoid overfeeding. It seems like when you try and step up rations too quickly, be very gradual and doing so can lead to BRD. Observe calves for state of well-being. Calf manure should be solid stools and not runny, not bloody. We talked earlier about calves not coming to the bunk. There's got to be a reason. And then for obvious reasons, we sometimes feed ionophores not just for feed efficiency, but most of the fact that they're pretty effective at preventing coxidiosis and don't forget trace minerals and certainly vitamin A in this year. As relates to vaccines, we talked about this a little bit earlier. They're important. The IBR, BVD, BRS, VPI3, they're all viral vaccines. We recognize them as five-way and they tend to be very effective when given properly and at the right time. When it comes to the bacterial populations, maybe it's a little bit less so. I would say that manhime hemolytica vaccines have some scientific evidence that indicates they can limit lung damage. Pasterol multashida, hemophilosomus, mycoplasma bovis. There's not very much scientific evidence that would tell us that they work. I'm not telling anybody not to use them, but from my standpoint, I have a hard time finding vaccine efficacy. So thank you very much for listening. I enjoyed this very much and we'll talk again. Thank you.