 Hi, I'm Dr Mary Carr, Chief Veterinary Officer for South Australia and I am pleased to welcome you to the Red Meat and Wool Growth Programme production brought to you by the Department of Primary Industries and Regions, Livestock SA, Animal Health Australia and the University of Adelaide. Today we are exploring the Enhanced Abattoir Surveillance Programme with a focus on arthritis. Enhanced Abattoir Surveillance tracks the health conditions of sheep found at the abattoir. These findings are provided to producers to assist with planning around prevention and management of prevalent animal health conditions. Arthritis is a very common condition found in South Australian abattoirs. Over the last three years, one in three properties submitted sheep to the abattoir with arthritis and one in seven consignment reported cases of arthritis. At the animal level, you will find arthritis in one every 30 sheep submitted to the abattoir. From a temporal point of view, we observe a peak of arthritis cases in 2017 and since then the frequency keeps decreasing progressively. This suggests that we have an improvement in the management of this condition at the farm level. The detection of arthritis is very different in lamb and muttons. Although arthritis is more likely to start with lambs, it is believed that the risk of arthritis accumulates with time and the age of the animal. Indeed, slaughter muttons are three times more likely to have arthritis than lambs. Also when we look at the spread of arthritis across the state, we can see that muttons are more likely to have arthritis when they come from the northern pastoral region. However, lambs are more likely to be found with arthritis when they come from the southeast of the state. While there is no clear seasonality in muttons, there is a very strong seasonality in lambs where arthritis is more likely to be found in lambs slaughtered in autumn. Arthritis is essentially a bacterial infection of all the joints. So there's a number of different bacteria, probably half a dozen. Somewhere between 15 and 50% of all infections are caused by eryciplus, which we can vaccinate against. The other most common one is chlamydia, which we don't have any cure for. They all tend to be environmental contaminants, so it's very difficult to avoid them. You just got to avoid areas where they're concentrated. So staphylococcus, streplococcus, other infections like that, which are normally on the skin anyway. And they attack the lining of joints and so cause inflammation and resulting in what we call arthritis. To gain access to the body, I need to get through a cut or a wet area, so for example the navel at birth, but probably the most common gain or entry to the body is at marking time. If we're cutting off tails, cutting off or castrating with a knife or mulesing, they're all open wounds, which are readily environmental contaminants. Bacteria can gain access to the body and they'll set up an inflammation in the joints, which way it may not show up for a few weeks or months after that initial entry. So arthritis presents on farm as a lameness and so it's either in one or more legs affected because the causal bacteria localize in one or more joints and so the animals will show a variable amount of lameness depending on how severely affected they are or will be euthanized because of it. Others may get through to slaughter and abattoirs. So it can persist for some weeks or months and may not show up for a long time until after a gained entry through a marking wound. Adult animals also affected if they've had a relatively mild lameness and probably missed being culled in the process. From a will to their consideration it's really the pain and suffering that lambs with arthritis endure. Arthritis presents in all the major joints on Ocarcus. Polyarthritis just means many joints affected. If you get two up here and two down here or maybe three joints down here affected, we know it's become systemic so therefore the entire Ocarcus needs to be condemned. Those are trained to look for any enlarged joint, abnormally enlarged joint and they'll look for the original lymph node to see whether that's inflamed as well. The process that they need to be able to recover as many good primals as they can from a normal Ocarcus. Once we start removing joints the primals are devalued and therefore it's of less value to them. The producer will get less money from the processor because the processor is not going to pay the producer for a Ocarcus that he's not going to recover maximum number of primals to him. A few years ago we had some enhanced avatars surveillance data come back from the works with a few lambs showing up with arthritis and we were noticing the kill sheets coming back with the odd lamb being a bit lighter so obviously they were trimming pretty hard. We did notice arthritis when we were weighing lambs, we found we were drafting off anything with a knuckle, front knuckle or back leg a bit limpy and probably a few years ago we sort of, I think it snowballed a bit on a wet season while we were lamb marking so we were probably getting five to a hundred so over a few thousand lambs it soon adds up to quite a few lambs in a mob so and that's not counting the ones that have probably perished in the paddock at lambing where they picked up the infection straight away and haven't been able to get up and suckle and mother up with their mother so we were losing yeah probably a few unknowns there as well probably affecting lamb percentages. The condition probably costs the business probably five percent in lost production with the trimmings at the works a bit hard to measure the losses in the paddock with lambing but we've noticed an increase of probably five to ten percent in our lamb marking percentages over the last few years. A few of the chains we've made we're incorporating AeroVac with a six in one with a pre-lamb in a pre-lamb vaccination program. When we lamb mark we use satellite sheep yards so we only lamb mark probably three thousand out of one set of yards just for hygiene stops the lambs picking up infections in the yards we use pallet load of hibertane and various different aseptiles and different products through the year. So many of the options for dealing with arthritis is primarily to prevent wounds becoming infected the main issue is probably infection acquired during lamb marking procedures especially where you're creating wounds either whether it's an open castration or detailing with a knife or a gas knife or amusing what we need to do is have all instruments sterilized and so basically soaking continuously in methylated spirits or some other appropriate disinfectant. Ideally when lambs are dropped out of a lamb cradle onto a fresh pasture not around yards where a lot of infective organisms have accumulated over the years so ideally move to a new site every day when you're lamb marking and some people put down for example old mattress for the lambs to land on just so you're not actually exposing the wounds to dirt infections. Lamb marking time we use a little like a trampoline set up off the side of the crate when the lamb tips out it they sort of bounce it on that and straight on their feet they're not rolling around the dirt disinfect everything was aseptile during the day we splashed the cradles and all guns and whether it's a tag gun any sort of applicators dipped in a bucket of aseptile every every couple of pens of lambs you know so we don't lamb mark in the paddocks that much out of portable yards so we found in the winter times here that it can get very messy very quick on the black ground it'll it'll bog up in no time so we've got gravel pads satellite yards the yards aren't used a lot before lamb marking so they get a bit of a spell hopefully no bacteria can live in the soil and so we do have airy vac which is the vaccine that we can give to use prior to lambing and also you may give it to the lambs at lamb marking but unfortunately we don't have vaccines against the other five or six different causes so if you get a response to airy vac well and good if you don't well that probably suggests it's one of the other bugs that are causing the problem the option to use antibiotics is only going to be beneficial if you've noticed a few days after lamb marking that there's a lamb lamb or two that are showing a bit a bit gingerly with their stepping uh looking you know looking like they're stepping on a hot tin roof if you get injections into them at that stage oxytetracycline or penicillin there may be an advantage but if it's some weeks after and you've already got swollen joints there's really no benefit with their enhanced saboteurs surveillance you get a lot of good feedback we can sort of address the arthritis issues if there's any other issues like ovus or pleurisy pop up we can address them as they come along as well but just with the data we receive back with the arthritis we've changed the way we treat hygiene on the farm vaccinating everything seems to address the issue and now arthritis is just something like one in a thousand lambs maybe we see nowadays so if that lamb percentages are going up every year just by monitoring what we're doing between 2007 and 2021 the department of primary industries and regions managed the enhanced abattoir surveillance program at lobathol and murray bridge with funding from estate and national sheep industry funds and national industry funding from meat and livestock australia it was the eas program that provided producers with the feedback discussed in this video although eas monitoring has ceased there are plans in place to transition to entering south australian data into the national system this national data can inform the development and funding of appropriate industry and government initiatives on the ground to better support south australian producers to reduce losses caused by unnecessary carcass trimming and to take advantage of premium markets to assist producers animal health australia has partnered with persa to create the sheep health conditions carcass impacts tool a 3d digital tool designed to show the industry what six common conditions look like on a carcass and give them an idea of how much trim may occur at the processor livestock essay encourages all producers to talk to their processors about what carcass and disease and condition data they can access from their consignments thanks for watching we hope you have learned more about arthritis and the importance of managing sheep health with the help of enhanced abattoir surveillance to find out more or get support with your business contact your local animal health advisor from the department of primary industries and regions or the south australian livestock biosecurity extension team through the livestock essay office the red meat and wool growth program is an initiative of the government of south australia and supported by meat and livestock australia the south australian sheep and cattle industry funds and sheep connect essay