Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Rebecca MacMillan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:26:18 GMT

Unfortunately the farmer doesn't want to investigate it any further at the moment, in his opinion the calves looked like they were starting to improve anyway when I last spoke to him. I suspect these guys will never catch up growth wise either. So it's still a bit of a mystery really!

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Ashley Rubens — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:48:45 GMT

have you had any biochemistry - may be worth liver / renal params as saw something very similar in a group of 30 steers related to acorn poisoning, all eventually came right with supportive therapy (basically b12 as a haematinic and pro-rumen and a combination of any other drug that you could imagine in a farmers drug cupboard), but lost a lot of growth.

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Rebecca MacMillan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:25:33 GMT

BVD negative!

Calves are doing ok at the moment, scouring seems to have stopped and they are brighter than they have been previously. Farmer also thinks they are starting to grow more now. So still a bit of a mystery, farmer is going to monitor them for now but has promised to keep in touch about how they are getting on!

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Rebecca MacMillan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:29:30 GMT

Trace element results for copper, cobalt (B12) and GSH-Px/selenium were fairly unremarkable, they were all within normal limits except for one calf that had slightly low cobalt at 91 pmol/l (ref range >100) and one calf with slightly high copper levels at 19.3 micromol/l (ref range 9-19). So nothing really significant that would explain the whole group of calves having these symptoms.

Still waiting on the BVD results...

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Rebecca MacMillan — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:46:19 GMT

Toxicity did cross my mind, the farmer is sure that nothing has been dumped or put on this field/paddock, but I guess you can't rule it out for sure.

I took bloods today for BVD and trace elements (copper, selenium and B12 (cobalt)), so I guess we'll see if that shows us anything or not!

Becky

Re: Adolescent calf diarrhoea?

Martin Jones — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:22:39 GMT

Realise this is a bit of a long shot, but have you considered lead poisoning (not all go blind). Had a really very similar episode about fifteen years ago, which was unresolved until some old salt mentioned that there had been a munitions dump on the site during WW2. The lead had taken all of fifty years to work to the surface. Carcases and soil samples were positive.

Collective signs could indicate (but not be restricted to) infection, parasitism, shared gene pool or poisoning. You've ruled the first two out, the third isn't the case (?), so I'd be going down the fourth, particularly heavy metal or pesticide. Presumably the knackerman would have spotted things like traumatic reticulitis, but it might be a good idea to do a FOC PM yourself

Martin