Crypto, The Kryptonite of Calf Raisers
If you raise calves, there is a good chance that you have met someone that has, or have dealt with cryptosporidium parvum. (C. parvum) on your farm. Not only is this disease dangerous for animals, it is also a zoonotic disease that can be easily transferred between animals and humans, making it an even larger threat.
We will kick off our calf scours series talking further about C. parvum. C. parvum has a unique life cycle in comparison to other common bacteria and viral diseases we see in calves. First, C. parvum is neither a bacteria or a virus, it is actually a protozoa, making it even trickier to handle. It is passed in the manure of an infected cow or calf, not uncommon with infectious disease, but after it is passed onto the new host, there are two types of oocytes that are released, thin walled oocytes and thick walled oocytes. The thin walled oocytes will rupture inside of the host and cause infection and the thick walled oocytes will move through the system and be passed through the manure to another new host, and even potentially reinfect the original host. It is a vicious cycle that is hard to escape once you find yourself in it. C. parvum is the number one cause of diarrhea in calves less than one month of age.
Calves are typically affected by C. parvum between 1-4 weeks of age via fecal-oral transmission, and typically start showing clinical signs of disease 3-4 days after exposure and usually lasts 1-2 weeks.
The most common symptom of C. parvum is diarrhea, but it can also present other common symptoms that come with diarrhea such as lethargy, dehydration, lack of appetite, and death. Dehydration from scours happens quickly. Even calves that do escape death take significant amounts of time to recover, and because of the damage done to the GI tract, specifically their small intestine villi (where a large amount of nutrients are absorbed), they likely will never reach their full potential.
Unfortunately, as of today, we do not have much in terms of protection or treatments for C. parvum. There is no vaccine, and extremely limited treatment options. That being said, prevention on other fronts is of the utmost importance to battle this disease.
The number one preventative measure you can take to keep C. parvum out of your calf barn is sanitation. Like any disease organism, they have power in numbers. The key is to keep those numbers as low as possible. There will always be disease and bacteria in an environment, but managing the amount is how you stay out of a life threatening situation.
We have done many fecal samples of calves with scours at many different points when the calves are between 0-21 days of age. What do we find every time we do? A little bit of everything, but always a little bit of C. parvum. It’s always there, waiting for an opportunity to take over an unsuspecting victim. As always, it’s important to run a couple fecal samples to zero in on what you’re calves are dealing with. It is impossible to correctly diagnose calf scours by calf age, color, or consistency. The only true way to know what you have is to test it.
We are pretty intense in our stocking rates in our barns, and we are just as intense in our sanitation protocols. We know that these diseases have power in numbers, so what do we do? We take every chance we get to knock those numbers down, especially during high stress (a.k.a high risk) times in our barn. We know our calves scour at different points between birth and 3 weeks, so during those times, we take additional measures to manage the disease pressure in those groups.
Our number one scour management tool is DK-ll cleaner. We will go through weekly and spray down the calf pens, buckets, and headlocks to help decrease the number of pathogens that the calf has to deal with. If a pen has more scours than we are okay with, we will spray the pen down once a day. The thing we like the most about the DK-ll is it is effective, and SAFE. We spray the pens with the calves in them! How many sanitation products can you do that with and not worry about skin or lung irritation? None that we know of.
And to make it even easier, we have a DOS-TRON unit that automatically mixes water and DK-ll at whatever rate we set it at, so we can just run around the barn with the sprayer and retractable hose and spray everything!
If you are struggling with disease pressure in your calf barn and would like to see if DK-ll is a good fit for you and your calves, send us a message to try it out. As always when it comes to calf health issues, reach out to your herd vet to establish a specific herd health plan.
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Sources:
https://veterinaryresearch.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13567-017-0447-0/figures/1
https://veterinaryresearch.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13567-017-0447-0
https://www.vet.k-state.edu/docs/vhc/farm/ag-practice-updates/Crypto.pdf