The Moos Room™

Joe Armstrong: Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Joe Armstrong. Just like everybody else, every once in a while, the Moos Room has technology problems and this week we had plenty. Dr. Bradley J Hines could not get on the internet to make everything go and he ended up having to call into this episode. I apologize for some of the audio quality issues in this episode, but we really appreciate you being here and we hope you enjoy this one.
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Welcome to the Moos Room, everybody. OG3 here. A very special day. We haven't had just us time, I guess is what I'm trying to say for a while.
Emily: Aw, us time.
Joe: No guest today and it feels good, to be honest. It's nice to just get back to the basics.
Emily: [singing] Reunited and it feels so good.
Joe: [singing] So good.
[dog barking]
Bradley J Hines: Oh my gosh.
Joe: [chuckles] Emily's singing.
Emily: I made the dog bark. [laughter] That's bad.
Joe: That's good. My dog wasn't close enough to hear me or else he would've barked too. Today, we're also covering a fairly basic topic. We're talking about just the basics of cattle vaccines. It's something that we have an article for on the website if you're interested, but we need to cover it as a podcast as well just because it's something that comes up all the time and we need to get into this topic just a little bit now and we can come back to it if we need to later. Bradley, I know we talked about this before in the past, vaccines, especially when you're talking about organic operations, just massively important. How do you feel about them?
Bradley: I think they're very important. From my standpoint, when we're working with especially organic herds, I think about respiratory diseases a lot because respiratory problems, even in conventional world, they're the death of an animal. Not death, but it can cause lots of unforeseen problems for a long time, especially in the milking cows. I think about them from a respiratory standpoint and really try to use a lot of vaccines so we can curb any respiratory problems that we have. I think they do work. I think they work. We can argue about the differences for scours vaccines or everything like that. For our herd and the way we manage our herd, those respiratory ones work.
Emily: Bradley said the magic word, manage. It's a management tool. Vaccination comes down to management.
Joe: Absolutely. My big thing is that as a veterinarian, I'm biased a little bit. I love vaccines as well. Everything, usually, that a veterinarian's doing, a lot of times it revolves around that vaccine protocol and prevention being better than treatment, all those things. Bradley talked about respiratory vaccines, which is a very, very, very big portion of what we do on both the dairy and the beef side. It's just a huge economic factor for both the beef and the dairy industry when we're talking about respiratory disease. It's a huge reason that we vaccinate.
Emily: It's mitigation, right? That's what it boils down to. Mitigating risk.
Joe: Yes, vaccines are insurance. That's what they come down to. Every vaccine can be overwhelmed if your management is poor enough and they're exposed to enough disease, especially if they're stressed. That vaccine doesn't necessarily protect them in those kind of situations. It might mitigate the clinical signs a little bit and reduce the effect the disease has on the animal, but every vaccine can be overwhelmed if you push that animal hard enough and you expose them to enough of the pathogen or the disease. We're not really trying to prevent the disease at all.
What we're trying to do is mitigate the risk and make sure that we have insurance for when that disease does pop up. The clinical signs aren't as bad, our production losses aren't as bad, those kind of things.
Bradley: I would say that I agree with that because the reason I started using respiratory vaccines is before when I started out here, there weren't vaccinating calves or anything for those diseases. We'd have pneumonia and you name it throughout the calf. That was one of the main reasons that calves died was from the respiratory problems. We started vaccinating at birth. We have a lot less problems. I shouldn't say that we don't have some calves that have some respiratory problems, but we don't have the full-blown pneumonias, sick, really bad cough-type issues anymore. I think the vaccine helps mitigate the disease.
Joe: When we're talking about diseases, and we should probably start there, there's basically three categories in general in my mind. We've got respiratory diseases, reproductive diseases, and then from there, we get a grab bag, but in the core, we're talking about clostridial diseases. Then when we talk about dairy, we start to think about, what are the mastitis diseases that we can vaccinate for? For all cattle, I don't care if it's beef or dairy, there's a certain set of core vaccines for me. The three categories that become core are respiratory, reproductive, and then clostridial.
When we're talking about respiratory, there's really four diseases that matter the most. We've got IBR, PI(3), BRSV, and BVD. These are the diseases that we would vaccinate for with a standard five-way modified live vaccine. I know I said there's four, but there's five in the vaccine because BVD has two types.
Emily: Really quickly, Joe, I want to cut in because you just said modified live vaccine. Really quick, there's two main types, modified live and killed. Give us the 30-second explanation.
Joe: Okay, 30-second explanation. Go on quick. Modified live vaccines are the virus or the bacteria that has been changed so that it no longer causes disease, but it's still alive enough to replicate and move through the system as the disease normally would just without causing the disease itself. The big thing is that it replicates and you actually do get a period where you're viremic or bacteremic where there is circulating virus or bacteria. Killed vaccines are just how they sound. There is no actual live component. You're either using a dead bacteria virus or a portion of those things to stimulate the immune system. That becomes important when we're talking about how we treat these when it comes to boosting or revaccinating.
I think that's a term I see get interchanged a lot. For me, they are different. Revaccinating and boosting are very different things. Boosting for me is something that is associated mostly with killed vaccines where we're saying, "Okay, to get a learned memory response from our immune system, we need to get two doses in" usually three to four weeks apart and that allows us to build that memory in the immune system and gives us protection down the road. That's not necessarily needed with a modified live vaccine. With modified live vaccines, if the animal responds and they're old enough, which is another piece of it, if they're old enough and the animal responds, they have immunity with one dose.
The reason that we give it again, which would be a revaccination and not a booster, is that not every animal responds every time to the vaccine. That's just a fact of biology and we can change how much they respond or how big that percentage of the animals are that do respond by reducing stress and making them as healthy as possible when we are giving that vaccine. Those are the big differences between the two. Revaccinating is giving it again to catch the ones that we didn't get the first time and didn't respond. Boosting is actually to build memory in the immune system. That's the difference between modified live and killed.
Emily: I think that was longer than 30 seconds.
Joe: It was way longer than 30 seconds, but I wanted to get into it. Respiratory viruses, these things are big because they create issues for secondary infections for the most part. These viruses are very easy to protect against with these vaccines. The vaccines do an excellent job, except for potentially bovine respiratory syncytial virus. BRSV is not covered very well by vaccines. We're not going to get into that today. There is a lot of overlap between those viruses and the reproductive viruses. IBR and BVD especially are two that can also affect the reproductive system.
BVD is one that I don't think gets enough attention and it's definitely out there and it's one that keeps me up at night as a vet because I think it can absolutely ruin your system. It could put you out of business, dairy or beef. Bradley, do you test for BVD at all?
Bradley: No, we don't. How many tests do I want to do and collect all kinds of information? It can be a good idea depending on, I think, well, Emily would agree with me, we'd probably have to go back to management and how would you need to do that to improve the management of your herd.
Emily: All comes back to management.
Joe: That's where it goes to. Those two are the big things for me on the reproductive virus side, the IBR, the BVD, and again, those are in your standard five-way modified live vaccines and that there are killed versions as well. That's something you need to discuss which one you're going to use with your veterinarian because are certain situations that one is better than the other in my opinion. On the bacteria side, this is a little different. There's respiratory bacteria and there are reproductive bacteria as well. Then clostridial organisms are bacteria as well.
On the respiratory side, there's really three that we worry about that are the most important: Mannheimia haemolytica, Pasteurella multocida, and Histophilus somni. Unfortunately, we don't have a great vaccine for histophilus somni right now, so really, most of our efforts are focused on Mannheimia and Pasteurella. If you're not familiar with those names, that's okay. They change them all the time. Mannheimia used to be a Pasteurella. Those are usually in combination with our respiratory virus vaccines as well. That's something where you can get those all at once if you need to for your operation.
Then on the reproductive bacteria side, we think about lepto. Lepto, I don't know if you've ever seen it before, Bradley, it's not real fun to deal with. I'm not necessarily convinced it's a huge deal for total confined dairies that never see pasture. It's much bigger deal for a situation like you see with animals on pasture, wildlife, all that other stuff.
Bradley: I have not seen a lepto or anything. We sometimes think about lepto in our herd because our cows are outdoors near deer running all over the place especially now. We do think about lepto sometimes and we have those conversations with our veterinarian if we have an abortion or something like that, but we haven't found it, but we do vaccinate for it.
Joe: It can be a big deal. It's definitely something that causes abortions and it can be bad. Most of the time we end up vaccinating for it anyway because it's already in some of our products that we give and there's no real reason not to for most cattle. In addition to that, we have another bacteria, Brucella abortus, which is brucellosis. That's the bangs vaccine, RB51, whatever you usually call it. That one I go back and forth on. Do you do it, Bradley?
Bradley: We stopped six months ago. It was in consultation with our veterinarian that we stopped. We used to do it and lots of herds have done it and continue to do it, but based on our situation where we're not really shipping cattle across state lines and we're not selling them at sales and we have a closed herd, it's like, "Is it worth the bangs-vaccinating animals?" We've made the decision to probably stop for now. The decision wasn't made lightly, I'll tell you that.
Joe: Absolutely. I go back and forth on it because I think that truly closed herds are rare. Even if you really do think you're a closed herd but you have an animal that goes to a show, you're not a closed herd anymore. I go back and forth. Yes, I think we've done an amazing job of mostly eradicating brucellosis, but part of the reason we don't see it is because we vaccinate. I look at human cases right now with anti-vaxxers and you saying, "Okay why are we seeing all these things that we never see?" It's because we stopped vaccinated. I go back and forth. That's a decision you make with your veterinarian, just like Bradley said, you got to talk to them to figure that one out.
Let's get to clostridial, which are big and that's our blackleg. Blackleg is the one that everyone probably knows the most. Every cow needs at least coverage for blackleg. I can't stress that enough. It hits hard and fast and cattle die before you know what's going on. It is a incredibly inexpensive vaccine. You just need to do it. That's all I really have to say about that.
Emily: The cost-benefit analysis pencils out on that one I think. Blackleg is devastating
Joe: So quickly, you need to just do it. The only question when it comes to that is are you going to add coverage for redwater and tetanus at the same time? Talk with your veterinarian, decide based on where you live and the exposure of your cattle to the potential of redwater and tetanus, are you going to add those at the same time? Then you need to find a product and check the label to make sure what you want is in that product. Have we covered just about everything in a very, very brief, brief, brief episode? There's so much to talk about with vaccines. We can't get to it all.
I'm going to run down what I think the core vaccines are real quick one more time. Then you need to work with your veterinarian to figure out how you're going to administer those timing and all that kind of stuff. Then maybe at a later date, Bradley and I will get back on and we'll argue about when you give vaccines and how many you give and all those kind of things and ages and stuff like that.
Emily: I will play referee.
Joe: Exactly.
Bradley: We give five vaccines as a calf.
Joe: What's the age on that, though? For what time period?
Bradley: One to three days.
Joe: That's too many. We won't get into it. Let's run down the core.
Emily: Dr. Joe, core vaccination, let's go.
Joe: Okay, core vaccinations. Every cow should be covered for IBR, PI(3), BRSV, BVD, lepto, and then blackleg. Those are every animal, beef, dairy, it doesn't matter, those need to be covered. Then you decide if you need to add, like I said, redwater or tetanus and that's it. You need to cover for those. Perfect?
Emily: Yes, sounds great. Then you've said this time and again, but I'll throw it in so they hear it from not a vet. For any vaccination program, protocol, et cetera, please work with your vet on that. They can help advise on what you really should be vaccinating for, what products to use, et cetera. That's why we have a vet talk about it. Also, talk to your vet.
Joe: Absolutely, talk to your veterinarian. They will help you with timing especially and the products. There's so many out there. Sometimes it can be a little confusing. If you know what you need to cover for, your vet can help you with timing and what products to use. If you want more information on this, we do have an article on our Extension website. Go to extension.umn.edu, and then search for cattle vaccine. It'll pop up right away. You'll see that article and everything we talked about today will be in there a little more detail. We will be back to this topic. We can't avoid it. If you have comments, scathing rebuttals, questions, anything for us, please, please, email us at themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: Bradley, you want to give it a try?
Joe: Oh, I don't know.
Bradley: T-H-E M-O-O-S R-O-O-M @umn.edu.
Emily: Just in case you miss that, that's T-H-E M-O-O-S R-O-O-M @umn.edu.
Joe: Perfect. Check us out on Facebook at UMN Beef and at UMN Dairy. We are on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety on Twitter. Then we have two YouTube channels. We have the University of Minnesota Extension Farm Safety and Health YouTube channel, and we have the University of Minnesota Beef and Dairy Team YouTube channel. Check those out, find all the information you want. If you can't find it, email us. Thank you everybody for listening. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Later. [chuckles] Goodbye, everyone.
Joe: Goodbye. I said good day.
Emily: [unintelligible 00:19:27]
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