Last week, Dr. Habing, Dr. Cheng, Dr. Arevalo, and Dr. Fonseca hosted a booth at the Cattle Producer Summit 2023 in Celina, Ohio! They explored Salmonella Dublin & Biosecurity, conducting surveys on calf producers’ practices and knowledge. Stay tuned for results from this informative session!
Great work, Team!
Watch and share a new video highlighting antibiotic stewardship education for dairy calf owners, a CDC project developed in collaboration with The Ohio State University.
This week, we started a new, qualitative research study that takes an in-depth look into newborn dairy calf management. Our team will be traveling around Ohio and our colleagues at the University of Guelph will be traveling around Ontario, Canada to host focus groups with dairy farmers to better understand early life calf care. These discussions will help us identify specific barriers producers face related to early life care, and the long-term goal of this research is to overcome these barriers to improve calf health and welfare.
Our first focus group provided rich data with a great group of dairy producers! We are looking forward to hosting more discussions and comparing calf management practices between Ohio and Canada. Stay tuned!
Our new publication in the Journal of Dairy Science is hot off the press! In a prior trial, lactoferrin treatment halved the mortality risk in pre-weaned dairy calves with GI disease, but the treatment effect was smaller and non-significant in this follow-up study conducted on multiple farms across Ohio. Excellent work, team!
Dr. Habing fielded some tough questions about the impacts of antibiotic use in livestock during the “Ask the Expert” event at the Farm Science Review. The “Ask the Expert” event is an annual, collaborative extension education effort among faculty and staff from the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences and the College of Veterinary Medicine. The 20 minute presentations from the experts address important veterinary medicine and farm management challenges facing Ohio farmers.
Dr. Habing and veterinary students, Miranda Hengy and Jess Garcia, attended the 52nd Annual Conference of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners, September 12-14, 2019 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Dr. Habing engaged with colleagues as he presented two posters on genomic characterization and trends in the antimicrobial susceptibility of Salmonella Dublin recovered from Ohio cattle.
Miranda also delivered a poster presentation on the use of a novel technique, Sepsityper kit with MALDI-TOF, to detect bacteremia in diarrheic dairy calves.
Jess shared an oral presentation on the prevalence of bacteremia in diarrheic dairy calves, and the potential association of clinical signs with bacteremia.
Conference abstracts and full posters are available here. Great work, Team!
Our Herd was recently awarded nearly $13,000 in USDA-Animal Health-Formula Funds to support the work of Ph.D. student, Samantha Locke. Sam’s work will focus on creating effective cleaning and disinfection protocols to eradicate Salmonella biofilms.
Keep up the great work, Sam!
Kent Weaver, second-year veterinary student, presented his summer research at Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine Tufts University during the the 2019 National Veterinary Scholars Symposium, the annual scientific colloquium which showcases research accomplishments by veterinary students completing summer research internships. The goal of Kent’s study was to use semi-structured interviews to develop an understanding of how dairy producers approach disease prevention and treatment on organic operations.
To learn more, check out Kent’s abstract and poster. Great work, Kent!
A deceptively simple assignment for fourth-year veterinary students at the dairy: Assess the health and welfare of this population. For the Preventive Medicine Rotation, we visited Waterman Dairy and challenged students to assess specific health and welfare parameters of cows and calves on the farm, and then return to the classroom and use records from the dairy to calculate disease incidence. Epidemiology really does sound simple until you actually have to do it… Our goal with this exercise was to make epidemiology fun and a little less daunting as students worked through tasks as a team, giving them confidence to apply these skills in future practice.
Recent OSU MPH-VPH graduate, Drew Barkley, presented his Master’s research at the American Dairy Science Association’s Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio this week. Drew estimated the prevalence of different pathogens associated with diarrhea in dairy calves on a number of farms in Ohio. Rotavirus and K99+ E. coli were the most prevalent pathogens, followed by C. parvum, coronavirus, and Salmonella. Also, risk of mortality was higher for calves infected with E. coli and Salmonella. To learn more, please read the abstract or check our Drew’s poster.
Great work, Drew!
