This week's Farm Health First vlog covers quarantine doses for bought-in cattle.
A good quarantine dose should 'clean the animal out', helping them to thrive for us, but also preventing them from introducing anything sinister onto the farm.
By 'sinister' what's meant here are new worm populations and, in particular, resistant worm populations.
The best way to clean an animal out is to use an active ingredient that the animal hasn't been exposed to frequently in the past.
Cattle farmers in Ireland and the UK are big ivermectin users - likely because it's cheap and easy to administer (pour on/injectable).
So, we would ideally opt for something different when a complete clean out is vital - e.g. when quarantine dosing.
Benzimidazoles (white wormers) are a good option here. Though they are administered orally, which puts some farmers off, there are a number of ways to make drenching cattle easier and quicker.
The product of choice here is Albex 10%, given its activity against adult liver fluke and fluke and worm eggs.
Here's a simple three point plan for dosing new cattle.
- Give the animals 24 hours to settle in our yards, then use Albex 10% at the fluke and worm dose rate.
- Leave animals to stand in a shed for 48 hours post-dosing. Some eggs might have been too far along the digestive tract to be exposed to the dose and these should be given a chance to pass in the yard, not on pasture.
- Turn cattle out to a dry field that has carried cattle in recent months.
The idea of going to a dry field is in case there are resistant/still liver fluke in the animal. These will be producing big numbers of eggs but on a dry field there won't be any fluke/snail habitats for the eggs to proliferate in.
Also, if the field has carried cattle on it in the months previous, there will be a level of susceptible worm larvae on the pasture already.
If our animal happens to be carrying worms that the quarantine dose did not kill and we then turn it onto a clean (no worm larvae) pasture, there will be no competition for these resistant worms and soon they will multiply across the pasture. After a while the population of worm larvae on the pasture will be exclusively resistant.
If there are already worm larvae on the pasture, these will reproduce with the resistant worms that the animal brings in and the onset of resistance in the field will be slowed down.
This week's Farm Health First vlog covers quarantine doses for bought-in cattle.
A good quarantine dose should 'clean the animal out', helping them to thrive for us, but also preventing them from introducing anything sinister onto the farm.
By 'sinister' what's meant here are new worm populations and, in particular, resistant worm populations.
The best way to clean an animal out is to use an active ingredient that the animal hasn't been exposed to frequently in the past.
Cattle farmers in Ireland and the UK are big ivermectin users - likely because it's cheap and easy to administer (pour on/injectable).
So, we would ideally opt for something different when a complete clean out is vital - e.g. when quarantine dosing.
Benzimidazoles (white wormers) are a good option here. Though they are administered orally, which puts some farmers off, there are a number of ways to make drenching cattle easier and quicker.
The product of choice here is Albex 10%, given its activity against adult liver fluke and fluke and worm eggs.
Here's a simple three point plan for dosing new cattle.
- Give the animals 24 hours to settle in our yards, then use Albex 10% at the fluke and worm dose rate.
- Leave animals to stand in a shed for 48 hours post-dosing. Some eggs might have been too far along the digestive tract to be exposed to the dose and these should be given a chance to pass in the yard, not on pasture.
- Turn cattle out to a dry field that has carried cattle in recent months.
The idea of going to a dry field is in case there are resistant/still liver fluke in the animal. These will be producing big numbers of eggs but on a dry field there won't be any fluke/snail habitats for the eggs to proliferate in.
Also, if the field has carried cattle on it in the months previous, there will be a level of susceptible worm larvae on the pasture already.
If our animal happens to be carrying worms that the quarantine dose did not kill and we then turn it onto a clean (no worm larvae) pasture, there will be no competition for these resistant worms and soon they will multiply across the pasture. After a while the population of worm larvae on the pasture will be exclusively resistant.
If there are already worm larvae on the pasture, these will reproduce with the resistant worms that the animal brings in and the onset of resistance in the field will be slowed down.