Description given on Youtube:
(Gregg) Anaplasmosis is a bacterial infection that attacks the red blood cells of cattle. (Dave) The male wood tick, actually the organism multiplies in the salivary gland of that male tick, so that’s one of the big vectors. The other big vector is a family of flies that we call the Tabanidae, which are Horse Flies and Deer Flies and those flies actually transfer blood by the bite and they are transferring fresh blood, that’s how they transfer the disease. (Gregg) The animal, once they become infected, the red blood cells are scavenged out of the system, they become anemic and so the signs that we see are, because the animals actually starve for oxygen, so, we are talking about staggering, open mouth breathing, trying to get more oxygen in, the classical sign in Kansas and in the mid-west is that a herd is positive is that they find adult cows or bulls dead in the pasture, one or more. There’s one that we call the microscopic examination, and that’s taking a drop of blood from an animal that we suspect to be positive and staining it and looking at it under the microscope and the stain will stain the bacteria purple and that’s a test that we are only going to use in those animals that we see clinical signs. So, the second test is a test that we are actually looking at the antibodies, an animal is infected with Anaplas, their immune system is going to build antibodies, we are going to grab blood samples and we are going to see if those antibodies are actually there. PCR, and that’s a test that’s relatively new but it looks for a piece of RNA, a piece of genetic material and the neat thing about it is that the organism doesn’t need to be alive, it will find the DNA or the RNA either way. (Dave) The goal is, do you want to be a free herd, which really doesn’t make sense in the eastern two thirds of Kansas, or do you want to just control the disease within the herd, know it’s there, it’s just a matter of how you want to deal with the disease and how much money you want to spend to take you to as few as clinical signs as possible. If your seedstock operation is in the Flint Hills, how much risk are you willing to assume that your bulls will transfer Anaplasmosis to a herd outside of an endemic area. With Anaplasmosis if we wait until we see clinical signs, which is the letter of the law on the label, we are behind the eight ball, it isn’t going to do us any good. With feed grade antibiotics, they are not legal to use in an extra label manner. Veterinary Feed Directives, which go into effect January 1, 2017, put enforcement in that ban on extra label use because the veterinarian has to sign off on it, the producer has to sign off on it, there’s copies of that VFD maintained for two years by the veterinarian, by the producer and by the feed mill to prove what was done. So if we have to go by the letter of the law, there’s some questions that need to be answered between now and January 1, 2017.