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Guest Dr. Cassandra Olds: What is Theileria, How is Theileria Transmitted, Heifer Development
00:23:49
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- [00:05]
A
Hi, welcome to BCI Cattle Channel. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here in the studio. Morning, Dustin. Good morning, Jason.
- [00:12]
B
Good morning, Bob.
- [00:13]
C
Hello, everybody.
- [00:14]
A
Scott.
- [00:15]
C
Morning, everyone.
- [00:16]
A
And by request, we had Dr. Cassandra Olds back. Good morning, Cassandra.
- [00:21]
D
Hey, glad to be here again.
- [00:22]
A
Last time you were here, we were able to talk a little bit about Valyria. You told us a lot about it, but we had some follow up questions that we wanted to ask you. So we wanted to get you back on and have a chance to visit with you. So we're happy to have an entomologist back on the podcast. Sounds like the start of a joke. If you have an entomologist, a nutritionist and a toxicologist walk into a bar. I don't know exactly.
- [00:43]
E
There's got to be a joke there somewhere.
- [00:45]
A
There's got to be a joke there somewhere. So we'll work on that as we go through. We'll also talk about getting heifers ready for breeding and what do we need to do right here at the turn of the year. We're thinking about. Okay, breeding season might be coming up for our spring yearling heifers. So we'll talk about that. As always, if you have listener questions, you can send us an email at bcisu Edu or you can reach out to us on social media. Before we jump into our topics for today, I had a question for you guys as we're right here. Around Christmas, I want you to channel back when you were a kid, that gift that you really wanted. There was a set of GI Joe stuff that I thought was going to be really cool. Still, still think would be really cool. But is there something that you really wanted as a kid for Christmas and hopefully ended up getting?
- [01:35]
E
Oh, yeah, absolutely. A, A Hot Wheels racetrack set, but not. I mean, I had friends that had Hot Wheels racetrack sets, but I wanted like this. With the loop.
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A
With the loop, with the loop.
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E
And, and actually there's a little, a little garage that they go through that's got the spinning wheels in it. Keeps them going, keeps them going.
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A
So.
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E
And I got it. It was so cool.
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C
It's back when they were made out of lead, right?
- [01:58]
E
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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A
100% lead.
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E
100% lead. We're ready to go.
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A
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
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E
Yeah, it does.
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C
It's good for you.
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A
What was yours, Scott?
- [02:05]
C
You know, I don't recall. Give me a second to think about it.
- [02:09]
F
I'm just amazed that the toys that Bob really wanted I also got and played with and really enjoyed.
- [02:15]
E
Yeah. See a few things. And you're implying that you're a lot younger, so it should have been a different generation.
- [02:20]
D
So yours weren't made of lead.
- [02:22]
F
Mine might have been the plastic.
- [02:24]
D
Plastic.
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F
Cheap ones where they didn't keep spinning and going. They stopped because it was just the plastic wasn't the full.
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A
It's hard to go wrong with Hot Wheel and to be so excited about the Hot Wheels. What was your choice?
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F
We also used to have, like, carriers. I had a carry of all.
- [02:36]
E
And then you take them to your friend's house with this little suitcase full of cars.
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F
Yeah, I don't know. I would say mine's probably like a 20 gauge shotgun.
- [02:44]
A
Jason.
- [02:44]
B
Yeah, it's amazing on those Hot Wheels how some things never change. They were so popular then and still popular today. I don't remember what year was or how old I was, but I remember really vividly wanting a certain bike and ended up getting it and just being really, really elated at that one.
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A
So. Yep, yeah, that's the. That's the fun one when you're looking forward to it and you get the right bike. Cassandra.
- [03:05]
D
I always wanted a pony, right. And never got it right. But then as an adult, bought my horse and I'm like, yeah, this is why my parents didn't buy me a pony. They're like, this is a cash sink. We're not doing this. Yeah, eventually got it and knock on wood, he's fine, but, man, they'll bleed you dry.
- [03:22]
A
It's a lot.
- [03:22]
D
It's a lot.
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A
Scott.
- [03:24]
C
I had a cousin that had, like, the original Nintendo with the Duck Hunt video game with the gun. And that's like, I want a Nintendo. And my parents like, you're not getting video games. So looking back, like, I'm glad they did that because I would have wasted a lot of time in my life instead of, you know, being outside doing stuff, I would have been sitting in front of that. So it's depressing at the time, but I'm glad for it now.
- [03:43]
A
When they first came out that Duck Hunt was cool, Pac man, when it came, I mean, all of those things. But it's changed. Video games have dramatically changed a lot.
- [03:52]
D
Yeah.
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F
So.
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D
So what you're saying is our parents being withholding made us better people.
- [03:56]
C
I think they had some forethought and knew that I have an obsessive personality and would have wasted a lot of my time.
- [04:02]
A
So you guys need to have your parents listen to this podcast so that they know now that they're you're glad you did.
- [04:08]
D
I told my mom, you know, you reach an age where you're like, yeah, my mom's always right. I'm just going to stop fighting it and just accept it and be like, yeah, whatever mom says, go.
- [04:16]
A
Excellent. That's good. There's good life advice right there. So when we talked last time, you gave us kind of a primer on deliria, a disease that's a parasite that's transmitted by ticks and stable flies and other bloodborne mechanisms. It has spread across a large percentage of the country. We saw clinical signs that would relate to loss of red blood cells. So in our stocker calves, we would see some signs that look like respiratory disease. In our adults, we'd see signs that look like anaplasmosis. Very hard to prevent. We didn't really get a talk much about the syndrome in stockers. So although it's right there looking like respiratory disease, there may be some differences.
- [04:55]
E
Well, I got a question too. Is this is a pretty new disease. When did it first come to the United States, and how much has it spread so far?
- [05:01]
D
Yeah, I mean, the first official, official reports were 2017. But then when we went back and looked at old samples, it had been here for a while. Kind of like how people are like, oh, I now have toileriosis. No, you've had it for five years. Right. And so the thing to remember is that once an animal is infected, it's infected for life. And so we can have cattle coming from, you know, the east coast, where herds are endemic, and there's no disease and just the shipping stress. And then they land in Kansas and it's like, well, you know, maybe it's bad weather, maybe they were a little bit. Had some other stuff going on. And then all of a sudden you see sort of a recurrence of disease. And so it's not that they reinfected, it's just that because they're persistently infected for life. Any. Any stress event. And this is like mature cows, that pregnancy. Anytime an animal is undergoing stress, when you're putting up the bull with the herd and he's running around crazy. So any stress event can really cause this recurrence of disease. So we see it a lot in stockers.
- [05:59]
E
Yeah, I was gonna say that sounds exactly like what I would expect if I'm shipping some stalker calves in from an endemic area. But then, yeah, they spend some time on the truck, they're on a new diet. A lot of things are changing.
- [06:10]
D
A lot of things. And it's A crapshoot. Right. Because we've had situations where from the same supplier, year one, catastrophic wreck, year two, no issues. So it's really hard to predict what's going to happen. So I always say that make sure that the animals that you're bringing in are as low stress as possible. Give them the best nutrition possible and just minimize any other thing that they may have to deal with that's going to cause them to waste energy on stuff.
- [06:37]
F
So you said Brad hinted at this. I don't think we talked about this last time. But east coast maybe in a fairly new disease, and it's moving west.
- [06:45]
D
It's moving west. Right. So the east coast has had it the longest. And so we tend to see in places like Virginia stuff like that when they. All the herds are infected. So everybody's got it. We will get to the point where this is just. Especially if, if, if, you know, there's these multiple transmission routes that it becomes most places habit and fairly endemic. And so, you know, your risk is going to be higher if you are bringing in cattle from the east coast than if you're bringing them in from, you know, super far north or the west coast or something like that. But that's not to say that, you know, not every. Every potload you bring in from Virginia is going to have a wreck. You know, people have been bringing. We've probably had tile Rosas on the Flint Hills for, you know, five, six, seven years. No issues. It's just when we get these, you know, because you expect a certain amount of loss. It's just when we get these really bad outbreaks that people start to pay more attention to it.
- [07:38]
A
Well, and I think that's one of the questions as you talk about, because you're the term endemic. It's here we've maybe developed some immunity. Do we develop immunity to this?
- [07:48]
D
We do. We do. So if cattle can get infected when they're young, low dose, you know, a couple of ticks or some high number of flies or lice, and then the immune response behaves appropriately. And really what this is is an immune response behaving inappropriately. When you get overwhelmed by the parasite. Your immune response does crazy things. And that's when we see disease. If you get a low dose immune response, behaves normally, no symptoms of disease, everybody's happy now, you know, you can go through that throughout life and have no issues. But then something, I mean, immune responses are crazy, right? There's we're a hair breast away from chaos at any given point in time with these things. And so just that fine line between something kicks something off and you can then have disease. And the problem is that there's no approved treatment. We're getting pushes now from because producers are like, well, you know, I have to have something. There is an approved drug out there, there's issues with it, but in the long scheme we have to look at what are our options. And so right now all it is is minimize your ectoparasites as much as possible, provide supportive care and reduce stress, good nutrition.
- [08:56]
A
We've described ciluria as a parasite, but we should probably be more specific. So we think of a lot of our disease causing pathogens would be viruses. We don't have a treatment for bacteria, we use antibiotics often. When I use the word parasite I'm thinking about internal parasites like worms or external parasites like flies. And we have anti parasiticides. So Deliria really doesn't fall into any.
- [09:21]
D
Of those categories cleanly. No, it doesn't. And the only reason why we call it a parasite is because it's a eukaryote and it lives parasitically. And so it's misleading, right, because it actually is more like what we would think of as our bacteria and our viruses like infections rather than parasites.
- [09:40]
A
But the antimicrobials are helpful or not helpful.
- [09:44]
D
When we look at it in a lab setting and you infect an animal with teleria and you use antibiotics, it's not helpful. However, we do have a lot of anecdotal evidence of producers using long acting tetracycline and saying that the animals do better. Now, did the tularea and the immune response kick off an secondary infection and that the antibiotics helped with that, which was just enough to get that animal over probably. And so I do think that it's, you know, it may play a role. It's not going to save the animal, it's not going to do anything necessarily to the tularia, but it may just help it deal with everything else that it's got going on.
- [10:22]
A
Well and I'd argue in some cases diagnosis is really important. The clinical signs almost indistinguishable from some of our other syndromes. So if I think it's valeria and I treat it, but I'm really treating anaplasts, then I would expect some of those animals to respond in the long term. So I think that's a challenge. Any treatments or therapies that you know of that are, that are coming down or anything on the way?
- [10:48]
D
No, I mean Bupovic one is out there it's available in other countries. Initially there was a resistance because it was like, well, when you treat with Bupovic1, you don't sterilize the infection. Yeah, but we're past, we're past that, right? We're. This, this horse is bolted. It's not coming back to the stable. And so there's. There's some other issues with it, long withdrawal times and stuff. But. But I always feel like we can work around that. I mean, my heart breaks when it produces. Like, I lost 20 animals. I can't lose two animals, let alone 20 animals.
- [11:17]
E
And so one of the things is in this international look is it's new to the United States, but there's other parts of the world that lasts other parts of the world a very long time. And it's kind of good to talk to people that have dealt with this their entire careers.
- [11:30]
D
Yeah. And like, well, you know, how are we managing this into the future? And I think it's going to come grassroots levels when producers say, hang on, I want this. And, you know, because the chemical company is like, yeah, we have it, but it's not going to be profitable for us to make it. Well, it will be profitable if we use enough. And so what happens with the bupavicone is that it, it knocks back the parasite enough so that you don't. So the animal can recover. So it will stay infected for life. But here's the thing, if it recovers naturally, it's still infected for life. So we're not altering the outcome, we're just saving the animals potentially. And so I do think we need to start pushing for something, some other option, because I'm tired of telling people, well, control your ticks, but what if you don't have the tick? Well, control your stable flies. How to control stable flies? Well, I can't control stable flies. Very.
- [12:17]
A
Stuff like that, very frustrating. Like some of our other diseases. And the one statement I would make on treatments, be sure you work with your veterinarian, be sure that you do follow, because we're still working with food animals. And it can be very frustrating. And it's easy to think about, well, I want to try this or this or this. Ultimately, all those. Almost all the animals will end up in the food supply chain somewhere. So we have to be aware of what we're giving them is approved and legal for that class of animal.
- [12:42]
D
And I was also saying with your veterinarian, right. The more you consult with your veterinarian, the better prepared he's going to be. When your neighbor Gets this or somebody else gets this. And so we need to start thinking as a community, like how do we help bring everybody on this journey? Because that's the only way is if we sort of work as a team here.
- [12:59]
C
I had a question more on the prevention side. I think last time you said cross placental transfer happens, but it's very minimal, like 2%. Is there a potential there to drive that number up so that you've got calves born that are already infected so.
- [13:12]
E
You actually want it to go up?
- [13:13]
C
That's what I'm curious about, a way that you could do that.
- [13:16]
D
Probably not. I mean, I think what I personally think flies are going to do the job for us if we just leave it alone. But you know, there's. The problem is anytime that because we don't have a treatment, anytime you try and artificially induce that infection, there is always the risk that is gonna go pear shaped. And we can't predict that because a lot of this is, well, that animal was just immunocompromised, or that animal, you didn't know that he was gonna go on the truck and get stressed and be next to this guy or something like that. So it's really difficult. But I do think that we will get to the point where all herds are infected and that for the most part it calms down. We just have to get over that initial hump.
- [13:58]
B
Well, and to that point I'd like to ask a question because I had it posed to me just last week. Question was from a producer as well. How close are we to getting to that point where we need to start changing needles on every single animal when we vaccinate or we give pre breeding shots and synchronization protocols and that sort of thing. So, you know, the question would be as well, okay, if we're going to get the disease transmitted through natural vectors anyway, outside of from an animal welfare standpoint on changing needles, of course, as frequently as we can from that standpoint, will we not be able to prevent it from transmitting anyway if we do that?
- [14:37]
D
Yeah. You know, it's often hard to answer these questions because we're so early on in it. And as much as this has been an issue in Asia and Australia and New Zealand, it kind of looks different. Here in the United States, our production systems are a little bit different. So I think as we move forward, we'll start getting answers to these things. But I think it kind of comes down to knowing your herd infection rate. Right. If everybody's infected, we're not making a.
- [15:01]
B
Whole lot of progress.
- [15:02]
D
Right. Or if you brought a new animal in, you know. So I think it comes down to knowing what you have and then managing it. And I'm serious. I mean, producers can reach out to me. My contact information can be linked below. If anybody is ever like, I've got the situation, what am I going to do? We can figure a way through it. Yeah.
- [15:21]
A
And we'll put your contact information in there. And I think a good question relative to the needles and changing them. And I would go back to there are some good BQA guidelines for, for changing needles, how often we need to change them, what are the occurrences? They don't specifically address bloodborne diseases like fileria and anaplasmosis. Although work with your veterinarian to figure out what is my goal here. Is my goal actually to prevent transmission or is my goal to control within the herd, which are two different objectives, and think through that process. The other place that we want to set goals is thinking about our heifers and we've had some discussions and I'm moving away from filaria and thinking about pre breeding heifers because here in a few months we're going to start the breeding season and I'll give you guys the scenario I've already decided. I've saved heifers. I want to get them bred. I want to get them bred really a month before the cows, which means we're right on the cusp of they're going to be coming into puberty. And should I or should I not do a pre breeding examination to find out where they are in the process and if so, what does that pre breeding examination entail? Bob, I'll go to you first and I'm going to get Jason's opinion.
- [16:33]
E
Yeah. So to me, a pre breeding exam is basically similar to our goal with pre breeding exams of bulls is make sure that these, in this case females, are ready to start the breeding season. And I think it's critically important because of my emphasis on, you know, I just focus on getting heifers bred early. I'm actually, I don't really want a heifer that's going to calve in the middle of the calving season. I don't want a heifer that's going to calve in the middle of the calving season. I want her to calve either before the calving season for the mature cows starts or very early in the calving season. And that's because of that longer postpartum interval for that after that first pregnancy. I just want her to get pregnant for her second calf early and then she's set up for life. So all of this has to do with, I want her to get pregnant early. And that really is why a pre breeding exam has some value. Because if I just want her to get pregnant Sometime in a 70 or 80 day breeding season, a lot of heifers will, but they may not get pregnant till later in that breeding season. And I want my replacement heifers to get pregnant early in the breeding season. So it puts more pressure on. I want to identify heifers that have already reached puberty by the start of the breeding season or are essentially ready to reach puberty right at the start of the breeding season. So a couple ways I can do that is get their weight because we know that age at puberty is driven a lot by how close they are to where they are in their growth curve, to their mature weight. And we can palpate the reproductive tract, the uterus and the ovaries. And a heifer that's already reached puberty or very close to puberty, her reproductive tract feels a little more mature. There's large structures on her ovaries, her uterus is a little thicker. And so I like a breeding soundness exam for heifers to identify those that are going to get pregnant early. And one of the things, and we can look at the ag economist, you know, these heifers are worth a lot of money to be sold as feeder heifers. So it's already a difficult decision of how many do I want to keep for replacement heifers. But if the ones I keep, I darn sure want them to get pregnant early. And so I think it actually fits into this period of probably true every year. But we've got high feeder calf market prices. Let's only keep heifers that are likely to do well in the breeding herd. And, and if her job, if she would be better suited to the feedlot, let's make that decision early.
- [18:56]
B
Yeah, so Bob and I think hit the nail on the head there as far as doing that pre breeding exam, you know, prior to 45 days or maybe two months prior to the start of that breeding season, whenever you think the best time is there. But I also think too, to your point on understanding where those heifers are, weight from a weight standpoint is really important. And so as I think about now for spring calving herds, I think really it's really important to understand where these females are weight wise and understand what plane of nutrition program we need to have them on to make sure that they're actively cycling. We've got them well where they need to be going into the breeding season.
- [19:33]
E
Kind of a nice thing about doing a pre breeding exam that includes weight and a track score here, you know, 45 days ahead of the breeding season, if I'm a little bit behind, they're not as I can make some adjustments and get them more, I can because I'm. My target is like say 45 days from now when we start the breeding season. I for sure want them to have reached their target weight and be ready to go by then. And by doing this exam a little bit before I. And it's not only an individual heifer assessment, it's also assessment of the group. How has the winter feeding gone on this group of heifers? And so my target is, you know, like 60% of them have already reached puberty 40 days before the breeding season. And then if the group continues on a good plane of nutrition, well, then I'd expect my 80 plus percent to be cycling in 40, 45 days. And so that it requires basically knowing what my target weights are and really kind of assessing where we go. Because every winter is a little bit different. I might have kind of planned to develop heifers just like I did last year or the year before, but we had a different winter, we have different feedstuffs. And so it's really good to check in on those heifers a little bit before the breeding season to make sure they're on track to do well.
- [20:48]
C
Do you put a lot of emphasis on pelvic area scoring at that time too?
- [20:52]
E
Yes and no. Of the ways I assess heifers, probably pelvic areas the least important to me, because it's in my hands, it was rarely a deciding factor. So it almost always went with lightweight, immature heifers. And so I was already prejudiced against those heifers without pelvic area measurement. But just every once in a while, you'll find that heifer that kind of breaks the mold and she's more, you know, she's fairly mature, but her pelvic area is small. So I don't use it to cull very darn many. But every once in a while you'll find an oddball. And so it has some value. As a group assessment, it's usually not that valuable. But to find that individual, it's kind of an outlier, it has a role there. That's the way I look at it. How about you use it? You need a fair amount of heifer development.
- [21:34]
C
Exactly. The same thing. I would say it's most. 98% of them are fine. But there is the one oddball that you would pull out. And you know you're going to spend the money and the time to develop that heifer and then have her have a dystocia issue and ruin her for life. You know, on a procedure that takes 30 seconds to do, it always seemed like there was value to be gained there.
- [21:50]
A
I think it's a good part of the total exam. And the misnomer on. And you could make this case for pelvics or track scores or weight is sometimes you want to interpret them individually. And we like to look at things. There's a threshold. They're above it or below it. You have to look at them in concert because they all play in together. Is. And you're asking the question, is this heifer at puberty? And more broadly, you're really asking, is my group ready? Even though we're examining individuals and we're looking through. So I think the mistake is to take pelvic or track score or weight and interpret it completely by itself and say, is this heifer ready or not? Using all three of them together makes sense.
- [22:27]
F
I was just going to say I don't know how long it takes to do one of these pelvic exams, but price of heifers at 3,4000 bucks. I'd look to think through the cost really quick and I would try to get as much information I can. Not only the group, but each individual.
- [22:42]
E
Yeah, it actually, you know, I do like to point towards the breeding soundness exams of bulls. It's very similar. It's. It's a way to really kind of predict are they ready to go into the breeding season. And really any year, that's important.
- [22:55]
A
But, but on those replacement heifers, you're. You're absolutely right. You look at all the individuals, you look. Look at the group, you make a decision. And none of those exams take very long, but can provide you a lot of good information there. So we would. We would encourage you if you're saving those replacement heifers. And I would argue whether prices are good or prices are not good. Your decision process is the same. I want to be sure that they get bred early. And you mentioned it, Bob, but I'll emphasize it. If she calves the first part of that calving season, that sets her up for life, that's where she's going to be for life. As far as productivity, there's several research studies that to support that. So appreciate you guys sharing today? Great conversation on deliria and replacement heifers. If you have a question for us, you can send us an email at bcisu Eduardo.