 First thing I want to say is that I'm in a position called livestock stewardship like it says on there and so I consider the things I'm talking about this evening with antimicrobial usage and How quickly and how good we do a good of a job we do on treating calves as a stewardship issue so it it still falls within my My I guess expectations or objectives to talk about this topic Let's begin. I'm going to start here and and actually I want to remind you too that every week For those of you that have satellite radio in your truck I get to be on Vets on call on Wednesday at three o'clock in the afternoon actually talked about some of these issues over the radio Now you might think it's a difficult thing to talk about What cattle look like when they're sick, but actually I think it's Sometimes just as effective as if you were looking at the cattle and so That's kind of what we're doing tonight, but I do have a few pictures to follow along with it So what does a pole look like and by pole? I mean what are calves that are? Exhibiting signs and symptoms of being sick. What do they actually look like? Let's start right there and and you can see I took this picture In fact, I didn't take this picture came most of the time I'm on foot so somebody else took this picture from the back of a horse I have done it in fact for the back of a horse It's sometimes a little bit easier to spot cattle that are sick just because especially for me You're just up a little bit higher can see a little bit better In cattle much like in human beings when we're sick and when cattle are sick There's all there's a limited number of ways we can express that illness and cattle are the same So when we look at sick cattle, they may or may not have respiratory disease Which is what we're going to talk about tonight. They may be something Maybe something else entirely, but they kind of all look the same One of the easiest things to get fooled on Especially in a feedlot environment or even in backgrounding environments if you're feeding a lot of grain is cattle that have Acidosis where they've got a bellyache Because their pH of the rumen has dropped too low. Those cattle will look every bit like they've got Respiratory disease and you can't always distinguish the two so you have to be a little bit more A little bit more aware and a little bit more observant to figure out actually exactly what's going on that animal in the lower right Hand corner that slide doesn't have acidosis doesn't have respiratory disease that actually had a Bunch of lesions in the mouth and so it didn't eat very well was not keeping up with its pen mates So what does a pull look like? Entitled as feedlot cowboy BRD which stands for bovine respiratory disease What does it look like the first thing that most of us will notice is that cattle will we use the term depressed? I don't know if cattle are depressed or not I don't know if they ever have a day when they can consider themselves to be depressed and need Prozac or something But from our with our human eyes we we use that term depressed because in many cases the headset is a little bit lower The ears are drooped just a little bit and they just don't look like they're feeling very well much the same as you and I Would feel when we are dealing with the flu or some type of of respiratory infection That's the first thing that will notice we up Also might notice those calves lying down and not wanting to get up when when their pen mates rise or they might stand alone More often than not though when we're when we're out in the pen One of the things that a calf will oftentimes do especially if he's not familiar with us he'll try and hide himself and So they'll hide themselves and try and get behind other cattle so you can't see them in some cases I've even seen him go to the bunk stand with their pen mates and put their head in the bunk would not eat And they're just trying simply to hide themselves, but that One of the things you'll notice with cattle that are sick is that they're not very full either Okay, that anorexia or not wanting to eat is a pretty typical of these cattle and that's sometimes in feedlots when the the Guys driving that the feed trucks are going by they'll notice calves That are not up eating because when you drive the feed truck by most of the cattle will come up to the bunk the ones that are Not feeling well won't You might notice some more severe signs like knuckling or foot dragging And sometimes that foot you'll have to be really aware of what's going on there to see that in dry pen conditions You'll notice that calf dragging its foot a little bit and the dust will be kicked up a normal healthy calf Will pick its feet up and won't drag its feet That's a sign that the calf is not feeling well Maybe they're short of energy because they haven't eaten for a while But but they're just not feeling very well at all and you can go all the way to do a calf that's down won't get up But surely we would have noticed something before that calf is down and can't get up Now the thing you might notice is nasal discharge You know a clear nasal discharge really is Fairly normal Unless it's too much it might indicate that there's some upper respiratory tract irritation from either the trachea from the nose itself When it gets really colored and it's nice and thick and And either white or green we know we probably got some type of bacterial infection going on So it may indicate something typically in the morning. You'll see a nasal discharge If you got one in the afternoon, you probably think of something's going on that calf needs a little bit closer look Coughing can be Can be a sign Our coughing is not always associated with lung issues or pneumonia as it's usually In the upper respiratory tract is more of an irritation going on So you'll hear coughing going on with some of those calves Really a soft moist cough is more indicative of pneumonia rather than that loud harsh Barking sound that you might hear that's typically up in the upper respiratory tract. I've just got a couple of pictures of lungs here and I You wouldn't have known that unless I told you because I don't have the whole lung in sight But those are some really really bad lungs that we're looking at here with the upper ones got some chronic Cessus it's got what we call consolidation that means that all the airways are covered up those cattle can't move there at all The bottom one's a little bit more indicative of what we might find in a BRS v respiratory syncytial case where the Spaces in the in the air in the lung are actually filled with fluid and that animal can't move air at all very well Okay, I Throw this slide up here and you should be on the slide that says BRD diagnosis and Because this this slide relates to what we've just been talking about When I look at the research surrounding our ability to find sick cattle We're actually not very good at it The research I've noticed it tells us that we're maybe 60% good So in other words we find 60% and 40% of the ones that need to be pulled we don't find now I know there's huge variability in that. I know that there's some of you guys out there that can sense When a calf is just thinking about getting sick and from my standpoint I that's that's where I'd like to see all of us Is that we have this almost six cents? We can look in the eye of a calf and go that calf's not feeling well. That's real where we really need to be as good livestock husbandry people and so if you think you need to improve and I told students today. I was teaching animal behavior. I want them to be powerful astute observers of animal behavior because an animal will tell you When it's not feeling well if you take the time and have powers of our reservation to find those sick cattle So that's what this slide is all about. This one says that in this in this Group of calves there were 35% that received treatment However, 72% of all the calves had lung lesions at slaughter. Okay So 68% of the calves that were never diagnosed or treated for respiratory disease had lung lesions at slaughter So at least in this data set, that's not a good scorecard We need to do better at that and and so take pride in finding those sick cattle and you'll be rewarded because they'll respond much better Driving into this area of therapy itself and for all of us that treat cattle We have to make sure that we don't do harm above all do no harm and that comes from From a guy by the name of Hippocrates years and years and years ago Let's not make the treatment worse than what we're trying to cure and obviously in the case of this calf looking at you Maybe went through a squeeze shoot a little bit too fast and and broke his nose We don't want to do things like that with no matter what we're dealing with We want to be able to say that we handle it carefully and they received treatment in a timely fashion What we're looking for in antibiotics is one that works One that's been approved by the FDA one that has the label Claim to be used in beef cattle We always want to think about beef quality assurance and preferably at least for me when I put together treatment schedules I'm always concerned about volume. I want to use something I think that works that is approved, but I always pick the one with low dose volume. I think there's less tissue damage I think there's less pain involved with that Antibiotics are chemical substances that were discovered back in the 40s Maybe late 30s 40s penicillin being the first one and it was produced by actually a mold That grew this substance that inhibited bacterial growth and that's where the all of our antibiotics have come from we've synthesized them in Later years and we have a I would say a very good armamentarium of antibiotics to use these days But they they're chemical substances produced by organism that suppress the growth of other organisms And we need to make sure that we use them wisely and and very carefully so that some of these products aren't taken away from them from us because they we are under the microscope today in our use of antimicrobials I Give you this slide this came from the Kansas State University diagnostic lab And what this got this gives us and I could have gone back a lot more years than this This is just from 2009 to 2011 giving us an idea of percent resistant isolates so in other words in 2009 there was 55 isolates this is for manheimia hemolytica the main bacterial pathogen that usually causes death in these feeder cattle and feedlots 155 in 2010 and 2011 or 179 isolates doesn't seem like a whole lot, but these were the ones of the diagnostic lab had submitted to them and for which they looked at where the isolates Resistant or not and all that means is that in the presence of this antibiotic Did the bacteria grow or didn't they grow did they did the antibiotic inhibit the growth of that bacteria in a in a in the lab okay, and so what it looks like to me is that Over time maybe there's a few more resistant organisms. Let's just look at oxytetracycline Which would be our LA 200s basically or noromyosin 56% resistant in 2009 or 81% resistant in 2011 Till Micasin you've seen that same pattern. In fact all of these drugs kind of have the same pattern Now this tells us something okay. It tells us that these isolates perhaps are getting more resistant But it doesn't tell you the whole story Because most of the time these cultures are from dead animals Which is means that you've already have a biased culture and these dead animals are most likely treated so they've already been exposed to the antibiotic so It's not a what we tend to see it doesn't correlate very well with treatment response or treatment exists to success Which is probably a good thing because if it did we'd be in trouble, okay Most of the time when you and I use one of the better antibiotics in the market today And we treat an animal with a bacterial infection for respiratory disease those animals get better They really do and so that's a good thing, but it also is a reminder if you go back to this slide that we need to be careful About when we use them and how we use them So to preserve their effectiveness for as long as it we can now well almost all antibiotics go through this Yeah, they will over time with use they will build up more resistant organisms So what about treatment response, how do we measure treatment response? And I just put this there's a couple slides here just a list of things that it just reminds us is not always the antibiotic It's where the cattle came from how long were they in the system before they came to my place in other words You know what did they come from Mississippi and did they where they shipped? 1500 miles and it took a week to put them together and and all those things see all of these things add to weather and We think an antibiotic is going to work or not. What kind of pathogens are we dealing with? What's our processing program? What kind of nutrition and tender loving care did those cattle get on arrival? And are we careful not to spread some of these pathogens from pen to pen? I don't know that we've done a good enough job of that Do we put do we put new cattle next to new cattle next to new cattle? It's not a good idea because you tend to if I could use the term fire We tend to keep throwing fuel on the fire when we do that So we need to think about where we put new cattle if we're buying new cattle every week or every other week Immune status makes a difference on these cattle The stage of the disease and I put in your crew attitude and capability this goes back to finding these sick cattle Are we good at it or have we got novices out there that don't know what a sick calf really is and is the attitude of the person pulling the cattle in the right place or is he worried about Health insurance is he worried about if his girlfriend is still his girlfriend? I mean, you know, it seems silly to talk about those things But those things are really critically important when we're trying to evaluate treatment response So what am I looking at in terms of what what response that I think is tells me whether something's working or not The first one's important for me. Did the fever actually go down? We we a lot of times have cut off values for when we're going to treat a calf or not Mine for years had been if the calf is 103 and a half or greater And I've pulled him because I thought he was still not feeling well I'm going to treat that calf in truth I will tell you that if I have a calf that I thought was sick and I pulled him and he in 102 and a half I'm probably going to treat him anyway Okay, I may have missed that calf. See, I don't know where in the course of disease he really was So it's nice to have these cutoffs, but In practical terms, we don't always follow them because we're a little bit worried We may have missed them And and we still want to put some antibiotic in that calf But 103 and a half some guys use 104 So did his temperature come down or not? What's his attitude? Did those ears come back up as he started to eat again as you started drinking water? I mean, that's really the most important barometer of whether a treatment is successful or not And we can use a lot of other parameters as well. Did the calf end up dying? Or did he respond so much now as a chronic? Did I have to retreat him again and retreat for me means I've had to retreat that calf Within the time frame for which that antibiotic should still be working So let's say I'm giving him an antibiotic that gives me a treatment for seven days But on day five. I've got a calf that I know I treated and he still doesn't look very good And I'm going to treat him a grand. That's a retreat Now a repulse a little bit different. I don't want to get bogged down in the terminology here But a repulse for me is a calf that's maybe two weeks away from that first treatment. That's a repulse He may in any case both of these may have gone back to the home pen But now I've got a calf that's outside that window of of that therapeutic level for that antibiotic And I had to repulse them. Okay. That's not always a good sign either. I'll I will tell you And then treatment cost, you know, what's that cost of that treatment? Doesn't really have anything to do with response it might It might if we're using le 200 and really should be using something that is a little bit more effective I took this from this is from 1996 and I contributed to this book As well as bob smith, but and these were really high risk cattle But he says response rates in the same yard using the same treatments range from 55 to 86 percent The reason I tell you this and he said does not do the antibiotic failure It's because of the factors we talked about earlier Where did the cattle come from? What age were they? What quality were they where they Were they the twos and threes that were bought one at a time or were they bigger groups? It's it's usually not the antibiotic that's failing. It's it's something else there that's Not resulting in the treatment response that you're looking for This first bullet point here on therapy This is some calves that I was familiar with when I used to work a lot with the stocker calves Average weight 552 pounds multiple southeastern origin multiple sale binds and order buyers Most of you out in the audience tonight don't have calves that will reach this level of risk But in this group it was 50 we pulled 52 percent of them to treat them one time At 3.1 percent mortality and 5.9 percent case fatality rate The case fatality rate all that means is that if I pull 100 calves Pull and treat 100 calves And six of them don't make it. That's a 6 percent case fatality rate Okay, and I'll use that number to kind of gauge whether I'm doing pretty good or not So what I've done below there I've looked I've just given this example of northern calves, which is what we have And they're balling which means they haven't been waned and they're commingled with other calves I'm hoping I can stay below 15 percent morbidity in other words sick ones I'm I'm sure hoping I can stay less than 1 percent mortality dead ones And I'm hoping I can stay 5 percent or less on case fatality rates. So Those are the my expectations for therapy if you're not there You see need to figure out what's what's happened here. Is it my antibiotic that's not working? Probably not there's something else that's not working quite right quite right within the system What about the cost of illness just going to make two comments on this? This is a study we did a number of years ago In which we looked at vaccinated calves versus non-vaccinated calves And they went to the Decatur County feed yard in Oberlin, Kansas And what I did I took that whole data set and I looked at calves didn't matter what's treatment group They were from in terms of vaccination But I wanted to look at all those calves that have been pulled at least one time Versus calves that had never been pulled or diagnosed and treated Okay, so I told you earlier that we could miss some in that whole process But that's that's all I had to go on here calves that have never been treated versus old have been treated one time And you can see there's a different number of head there obviously because not all those calves got sick The average daily gain this is from when they came in at about 600 pounds till they went out at about 1200 Pounds may have been just a short a little bit. There's a four tenths of a pound difference per head per day That's huge. I mean this cost of illness is huge. It's not just the treatment Costs which have gone up considerably, but the performance loss on those calves can be considerably if we don't find them quickly What I've done here, and I don't know if I'm going to take the time to explain this a little bit But when I worked in the stocker calf industry, I would try and calculate the cost of illness And I should have visited with tim about this ahead of time so he could correct my mistakes here, but What I try and think about is that if I've got illness in a group of calves and it exceeds a certain percentage Or it's a certain percentage How much cost of that has to be assumed by every calf in the pen? Okay That's actually of more interest to me So this is how I did it. I took a 10 sickness rate And I used here a value of gain And and and while all that is just determining the value of going from let's say 600 pounds to 800 pounds For every pound I put on. What's the value? Okay, that's what that value of gains all about And I've used 90 cents. I I think I'm fairly close in there And then I've used that 0.4 pounds per head per day loss of performance and then and for 90 days on feet That's three dollars and 24 cents and you can see I've used a 30 dollar treatment cost pretty high But I did it to kind of serve my purposes here I've used the processing cost because most of the time on our processing costs It's geared toward preventing respiratory disease and I've included morbidity in there and and chronics and and uh dead ones And so in my scenario here of 10 percent 10 sick ones and this Results in a half a percent death loss half a percent chronics Every calf in that pen or in that group has to assume 23 dollars and 89 cents I think that's a good way to think about it. Okay And so can I do things that can reduce that cost every calf? Well, if I give every calf an expensive antibiotic on arrival It's kind of a break-even. Okay And I've just done something a little different here How much would a 600 pound animal need to be discounted to make up this cost? And I just used that 23 dollars and 89 cents divided by that six weight. You'd have to discount that animal four cents So this what this does it allows you to say, okay, I've got this group of calves. I know a little history on them I'm putting three groups together Maybe I can't pay a dollar 69 or 70. Maybe can I get them bought for four cents back to make up for some of that? cost of that illness Just a couple slides left here and all I've done here. I'm not come I'm not Recommending an antibiotic here. I'm just telling you that when the bottom line comes Most of these antibiotics actually do a tremendous job And it's usually not the antibiotic. Yeah, there are some numerical differences here But if we find those animals quickly If we do our job on tender loving care and the right nutrition and low stress handling Most of the antibiotics are going to be in about the same level in terms of response Remind you that These are prescription antibiotics if you use any other drug or use drugs off labels an extra level drug use and You have to have that valid veterinary client patient relationship I'm not going to talk about combination therapies. I hope none of you do it. It adds way too much cost You don't get any different response I think this is basically the last slide carl and I just want to Leave them leave you with this I think For those producers in the audience that background calves or feed calves and we do it every year You ought to go into your veterinarian and I I'm not going to get veterinarians in trouble for this at all I think they'll delight if you'd come in there and say, you know doc I want you to provide me a treatment schedule I don't want to just Running and say well, give me a bottle of this or give me a bottle of that And and I tell you I got respiratory disease. I want you to outline what I should use What the dose is if I should repeat it. What's the route of administration and withdrawal time? I think the veterinarians in this state Would be happy to do this for you. Okay So I I think this is what you need so that there's no questions If you're gone for the weekend and your brother-in-law or somebody's doing the chores for you needs to treat cattle He just goes to the the treatment schedule. He says this is what I'm supposed to do It takes a lot of the air and a lot of the Wrong dosing and all that sort of thing going on. So I think this is important In terms of antibiotic usage And I think I'll just end with that This is the last slide and I one of the things I didn't talk about I didn't think it really had time for it But that's sometimes we'll use antibiotics on arrival for those really high risk calves But I just chose not to go in that direction this evening