What You Need to Know to Protect Calves from Chronic BRD

 

A serious disease with lifelong productivity and profitability losses might be lurking in your calves: bovine respiratory disease. BRD, or calfhood pneumonia, is one of the leading health concerns impacting heifer calves, even on the best-managed dairies.

The first 90 days of a calf’s life is crucial to growth and future potential, and a BRD infection can knock her down in an instant. Affected calves can experience decreased weight gains immediately — as much as a third of a pound a day— compared with calves not infected.¹

Furthermore, calves that experience pneumonia in the first three months of life are more likely to experience delays in calving, breeding and milk production.¹ In fact, a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin — Madison found cows that acquired lung damage from calfhood respiratory infections produced 1,155 less pounds of milk in their first lactation.²

While producers may associate calf pneumonia costs with just treatment, it’s important to understand these costs go beyond treatment and labor and continue to accumulate over the lifetime production of that affected animal. Early detection and diagnosis of BRD is critical to help minimize re-treatment, chronic cases and lost future profitability.

A Cause of Chronic BRD

This past winter, I saw calf ranches that I work with experience an uptick in cases of BRD cases caused by Mycoplasma bovis (M. bovis). One of the main pathogens of calf pneumonia and a major contributor to chronic BRD cases, M. bovis is a particular menace that producers need to look out for in their young calves.

Respiratory disease caused by M. bovis is known to have vague early symptoms with an insidious onset. Not only can the pathogen reside in the upper respiratory tract without showing signs of disease but also it can be accompanied by other BRD pathogens.  Due to this, infections may not be identified early, and this can lead to delayed treatment, poor response to antibiotic therapy and an increased risk of death loss.

Though there is limited data on the prevalence of M. bovis, a recent study showed that M. bovis was isolated in 67% of calves with clinical signs of BRD.³ Furthermore, the presence of M. bovis in calves increased the odds of BRD by 74%.³ Producers and veterinarians commonly see increased rates of transmission in young calves when milk or colostrum infected by M. bovis is ingested or around post-weaning when calves are moved to group housing and commingling among one another.

The challenge of these chronic cases — and poor response to antibiotic therapy, tied with limited efficacy of available commercial vaccines to help protect against M. bovis ⁴ — has caused the dairy industry economic and animal-welfare hardship. It’s of utmost importance that producers and farm teams work together to apply management protocols that promote a healthy environment and help minimize the impact of calf pneumonia.

Start Your Calves Off Strong

To help prevent chronic cases of respiratory disease caused by M. bovis and other BRD pathogens, I recommend that producers work closely with their veterinarian and focus on calf care, as well as their diagnosis and treatment protocols to consider what is best for their herd. Dairies can work to improve their calf and heifer program through a variety of initiatives:

1. Focus on Calf Care Basics

Fine-tune your colostrum management program. By giving your calves the highest-quality colostrum as close to birth as possible, you gain an advantage by providing protective antibodies that help reduce disease risk. Consider heat-treating or pasteurizing colostrum and waste milk to help decrease the risk of transmitting disease-causing pathogens to calves.

Check air quality and ventilation. Especially in the winter, spring and fall months when temperatures are fluctuating and housing may be enclosed to keep calves warm, check air quality frequently. Constant air flow helps reduce exposure to pathogens that can cause damage to upper respiratory tissue and increase the risk of BRD. Crouch down to a calf’s level to smell if the air is fresh or bedding is dry.

Ensure quality sanitation practices. Whether it’s bedding, equipment or hutches, employing routine sanitation protocols can help reduce pathogens that may be lurking on surface areas.

Plan for a smooth weaning transition process. Calves need to be transitioned gradually to a new feeding program and group housing so that they maintain dry matter intake to keep growing and build a strong immune response. Help manage transition challenges through weaning by keeping a consistent diet as they move to group housing, provide adequate resting space, and group calves by similar size and weight.

Consider an intranasal vaccine to help protect against respiratory disease. This type of vaccination can help causea local immune response with viral antibodies produced in the nasal passage where BRD-causing pathogens are likely to occur.

2. Build an Effective Diagnosis and Treatment Plan

Educate farm teams of the key clinical signs of BRD. This may seem simple, but identifying early symptoms is easier said than done. As mentioned earlier, calves are good at hiding symptoms, and diagnosing disease caused by M. bovis also is difficult. It can be helpful to observe calves during feeding time to identify lack of appetite, along with other telling signs such as drooping ears, rapid breathing, coughing, fever, head tilt and nasal discharge.

Work closely with your veterinarian to outline diagnosis criteria and treatment protocols. Consultation can confirm guidelines on disease identification, when calves should be treated, what constitutes re-treatment, and what antibiotic therapy to use and for how long.

3. Antibiotic Treatment Considerations

Ensure antibiotic therapy treats the four major pathogens of BRD. These pathogens include Mannheimia haemolytica, Pasteurella multocida, Histophilus somni and Mycoplasma. bovis.

Consider long-acting, fever-reducing antibiotic therapy. Longer-acting antibiotics can greatly increase the chance of successful treatment. Shorter-acting anti-infectives leave an animal’s system within a day and it can be easy to

opt for a re-treatment when a calf doesn’t show immediate improvement. This not only puts stress on the calf but also adds to labor and treatment costs and potential productivity loss. A longer-acting anti-infective helps give a weaned dairy calf’s immune system time to clear the infection and recover and provides the caregiver peace of mind knowing that the treatment is at work. Treatment such as Draxxin^® KP (tulathromycin and ketoprofen injection) Injectable Solution, from Zoetis, provides 14 days of BRD therapy with a fever-reducing NSAID to help improve weaned dairy calves’ well-being.^5*

Be patient with treatment and post-treatment intervals. Remember that the role of an anti-infective is to decrease the bacterial levels of a disease and jump-start the calf’s defense system to clear the infection. Allow enough time during the post-treatment interval — the time needed for the antibiotics to work after the first treatment — until the point the weaned calf can be classified as a non-responder. Consult your veterinarian before facilitating re-treatment.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION: Draxxin KP has a pre-slaughter withdrawal time of 18 days in cattle. Not for use in female dairy cattle 1 year of age or older, including dry dairy cows. Not for use in beef calves less than 2 months of age, dairy calves, and veal calves. A withdrawal period has not been established for this product in pre-ruminating calves. Do not use in animals previously found to be hypersensitive to tulathromycin and ketoprofen. See full Prescribing Information, here.

*Animals treated with Draxxin KP showed numerically improved attitude and respiratory scores compared with animals treated with saline and Draxxin post-treatment.

¹ Stanton AL, Kelton DF, LeBlanc SJ, Wormuth J, Leslie KE. The effect of respiratory disease and a preventative antibiotic treatment on growth, survival, age at first calving, and milk production of dairy heifers. J Dairy Sci. 2012;95(9):4950-4960.

² T.R. Dunn, T.L. Ollivett, D.L. Renaud, K.E.Leslie, S.J. LeBlanc, T.F. Duffield, and D.F. Kelton. The effect of lung consolidation, as determined by ultrasonography, on first-lactation milk production in Holstein dairy calves. J. Dairy Sci. 2018; 101:5404–5410

³ Deepak, Aly SS, Love WJ, et al. et al. Etiology and risk factors for bovine respiratory disease in pre-weaned calves on California dairies and calf ranches. Prev Vet Med. 2021 Dec;197:105506.

⁴ Maunsell FP, Woolums AR, et al. Mycoplasma bovis Infections in Cattle. J Vet Intern Med. 2011;25:772–783.

⁵ Data on file, Study Report No. A431N-US-16-418, Zoetis Inc.

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