Tackle disease to eradicate its woes and wastefulness

I tell her I’ve never had a PA before, have no idea how it works and it would probably be better for all concerned if she told me. So she flips open this notebook she always carries and says: “Right, what are the dates of your wife’s birthday and your wedding anniversary? Let’s have a look at your credit card number.” So, for several years, flowers turned up on the appropriate dates with suitable messages – good job “she” never reads this. I still miss that part of having a PA – I’ve had some scary near misses since.

But there was a lot more to it than a couple of bunches of flowers. Every week I would get a meticulous itinerary with all the appropriate meeting notes and rail and plane tickets. If I’d kept all that I would have a superb diary, but what I do have is a book that is a compilation of articles I wrote (and still write) in a magazine called Dairy Farmer. It goes back to the 1970s when I started writing in it and, in some respects, serves as a sort of diary.

BVD burden

I was thinking about bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) the other day. This disease is receiving a high profile in the press with advertisements for vaccines. Most people seem to vaccinate for it and I sense a move to eradicate it is imminent. It is already eradicated in other countries and from a national herd health point of view, is probably a move we should make sooner rather than later. But it’s a road we’ve been down before with other diseases, so there is no need to be afraid about this one.

So, out comes my compilation book – let’s have a look to see if it mentions brucellosis. It tells me how when we first did a voluntary herd test, we had 12 reactors. At the time there was some scary stuff about brucellosis – vets were getting affected, often inadvertently injecting themselves I think, but often with tragic consequences. The advice was to inject with 40/20 and wait for a compulsory scheme with compensation to come along. However, I sent the 12 off immediately. I confounded everyone, including myself, by never having a brucellosis reactor again. The 12 cows were probably 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the herd.

But I do remember abortion issues didn’t go away. In December 1979 I report we have had five abortions since the summer. Every time we look for brucellosis, but never find it. By 1983, abortion is still a problem – I report yet another cow has aborted, but don’t quantify it any further. By now the ministry vets in the Shrewsbury Veterinary Investigation Centre are involved. I do remember you could easily spot the cows that were going to abort beforehand. They would go through a sort of speeded up pre-calving sequence – enlarged vulva and a little bit of “bagging up”.

I was instructed to take every foetus to Shrewsbury as soon as possible and can remember on a couple of occasions removing the foetus straight into a plastic fertiliser bag without it touching the floor and getting it into Shrewsbury still warm. A ministry nutritionist was checking everything we did to feed the cows in parallel to the veterinary work and we were given a pat on the back for how we fed them, which was okay in the scheme of things, but of little consolation. I can remember at the end of a long period of exhaustive tests that had drawn a blank, the ministry vet saying: “The best we can hope for is it goes away again.” Which is exactly what I was thinking, but without the veterinary expertise to back it up.

It did eventually go away of its own accord, whatever it was. What I do remember was before my writing days, which is obviously before my written record days, one year we had 33 cows that aborted out of a herd that would have been around 75. How would you ever forget that? You cannot begin to count the cost of such a problem. There’s the obvious loss of the calf, the resulting loss of milk and most of the cows were difficult to get back into calf again, so there was the cost of replacing them.

The scenario would get sympathetic noises from the bank manager, but be nowhere on your farmer’s annual statement for him to quantify the cost, expecting it would be quantified on the bottom line. Without doubt, all those abortions would be down to brucellosis – what they called a “storm”. What affected us in those later years is still a mystery. We have been vaccinating for BVD for several years now and are seeing the benefits – particularly in calf health. We take tissue samples to check the calves’ status is negative and so far, touching all the wood I can find, it has been.

What this story serves to emphasise is how wasteful an issue disease can be. We largely eradicated brucellosis, which, at one time, was almost endemic in the national herd and we should embrace the chance to tackle other diseases in the same way. Apparently a veterinary practice not far from here found five TB breakdowns last week. This was told to me in the pub, so could quite easily have been only four. No need to worry then.