EAHAO #14 - Improving cattle health through Diagnostics with Dr Bob Gentry

“if you don’t know what (the disease) is, then you can’t manage what you’re trying to treat or to prevent. “

For cattle producers and veterinarians, Diagnostics is the science that drives hitting the bullseye vs simply hitting the target.

In this episode, Dr. Robert "Bob" Gentry explains how disease diagnostics work and their practical application for the modern cattleperson.

Recorded February, 2025 - 4:47 minutes

Medgene - it's a new day for animal health care!
https://medgenelabs.com

The opinions expressed are those of the individual(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Medgene.  Potency and efficacy of prescription platform product biologics have not been established. This product is prepared for use only by a veterinarian prescription.

Medgene’s prescription platform system ensures that all the ingredients that go into our vaccines are animal origin free.

#veterinarian #cattle #vaccines #vaccinescience

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www.MedgeneLabs.com
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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Every Animal Has an Owner. A Mostly Large Animal Podcast for veterinarians and the people that depend on them.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

If you don't know what it is, then you can't manage what you're trying to treat or to prevent. And so the diagnostics in other um you know in other species such as poultry and swine, diagnostics are ongoing and a well-understood need for the industry for having ongoing surveillance on a regular basis so that they can manage any disease challenges that those animals are dealing with. In the cattle industry, it it's only in its infancy to be using uh large-scale surveillance diagnostics, and it is coming forward in the last few years and will continue to get better over the next few years as far as how much we jump in and use a diagnostic uh process to determine the cause of the disease and then uh create a better intervention, uh, usually in the way of a vaccine that we can use on future herds. Well, in diagnosing BRD, um it used to be typical that you would wait, and then if a calf died, then you would do um a post-mortem collect samples, samples of all the lung and and the tissues that are affected by the respiratory diseases and send those to a lab, and the lab would determine what your diseases were. And then eventually we started doing where we could do a culture of the back of the throat, and uh so we're doing nasopharyngeal swabs where we could do that, and then we get a bacterial culture to see if we could identify the bacteria, and then also get a sensitivity of the bacteria to antibiotics so we know which antibiotic to use. But more recently and in recent years, the the improvement in the molecular diagnostics meaning that we can do a DNA test, and we can do it very early in the process because those DNA tests have become so precise that we can take a nasal swab or a pharyngeal swab the day the animal arrives at the feedlot or at any other stage of production, we can simply grab those samples. We can do the same thing with feces, and even on feces, you don't have to catch the animal, you just pick it up when they drop it, and we can send those in for a very early diagnosis to a diagnostic lab, and we can have an answer in 24 hours as to what viruses those and or bacteria those animals are dealing with, and we can have it done before uh they get sick and have it an answer and and be prepared to intervene. So if we die, you know, diagnosing um we're trying to do a diagnosis and we diagnose the typical IBR BVD or a BRSV and and a uh and a PI3, which is where the traditional vaccines have been, um, we can utilize those vaccines and and prevent these diseases very well. And now in recent years, the diagnostics labs have shown that IBRBD and to some extent BRSV has decreased in the finding it simply because we do such a good job of vaccination with effective vaccines. The problem is that when we're now that we have the ability to find other things with these sophisticated diagnostic molecular tests, then we have uh a disease that we can identify that there's not any commercial vaccine available, but we can take those and get a gene sequence of those uh new organisms, and we can from that gene sequence put that into a vector and create a subunit vaccine specific to not only that new disease, but to the strain that we found in that animal. And the precision is unbelievable in how we can take uh a diagnosis from the beginning and take it up through the system and create a vaccine that is not available anywhere else and is precise to the exact strain of the virus that we have found.