Treatment Protocols for Sick Cattle
K-State’s Mike Apley discusses establishment of protocols to help cattlemen in treating sick cattle.
Improving animal welfare is a goal within the beef industry. This goal requires training to ensure all parties follow specific guidelines and standards.
“We can’t rely on people following instructions without them being written down,” said Mike Apley, Kansas State University (K-State) professor of production medicine. Veterinarians rely more and more on written instructions for prevention and treatment procedures. As such, it’s important that operations develop protocols for treating sick cattle.
For protocols to be effective and worth implementing, certain requirements are necessary. Protocols should have consistent application, minimal treatment exceptions and supporting evidence for treatment options. They need a defined end point for treatment and dedicated individuals for implementation. Apley said all parties involved in the protocol should manage it together.
“A vet should be leading the process. Management and the people that will be implementing the protocol should be involved in creating it so they feel they have ownership,” he said.
Protocols should define when and how to treat animals. This prevents unnecessary treatments and keeps treatment procedures uniform. Protocols should also define treatment success or failure. Each case must follow consistent protocol application and be evaluated when treatment is complete. Always include any special safety instructions for handling drugs in the treatment guidelines. If cattle will be marketed in the future, it’s critical to know the slaughter withdrawal time.
To ensure proper treatment, Apley suggests using a scoring system to evaluate sickness. This helps employees determine how advanced the disease is for an animal. He ranks animals from 0 to 4. A 0 represents a healthy animal, while a 4 means the animal is unable to move or may be approaching death. This score ensures all animals are treated properly according to their level of sickness.
It’s important to classify each case as a success or failure and determine why. Apley said to remember that most times, the drug isn’t the cause for failure.
“You can look and see if it’s a morbidity or mortality problem,” he said. The best way to measure this is through detailed records. Records won’t explain why cattle got sick and why a treatment did or didn’t work. However, they can show how many animals were treated and what the outcome was. Sometimes when issues arise, the first reaction is to change medicines, but Apley said microbials often are the problem.
“If you’re having a lot of morbidity with a reasonable case fatality rate, it’s morbidity. If we find that we have a reasonable morbidity but really bad fatality, then we start looking at other options,” he said.
The problem could be that treatment was too late or the animal was unable to respond to medicine.
“Different antibiotics can be an answer, but shouldn’t be our first knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “We all recognize and agree that once we have to start using antibiotics for therapy we’ve failed in our prevention strategy.”
