PONOKA, Alta. — Shoot, shovel and shut up is not the approach to take when trying to control scrapie.
Scrapie in sheep and goats is part of a family of diseases similar to BSE in cattle. Two-thirds of countries have plans to trace and eradicate it and Canada is no different, said Corlena Patterson, manager of Scrapie Canada.
“Those days of hiding anything are long gone. The ability to cover up is long gone and with the information network that is available to the world, that sort of information is at everyone’s fingertips,” Patterson told the Alberta Goat Breeders Association’s recent annual meeting in Ponoka.
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“We have to push past that philosophy of just covering it up.”
Scrapie eradication is part of a national transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) plan that has been administered through the Canadian Sheep Federation for the last seven years.
The goat industry decided in 2010 that it wanted its own program to find out if the disease appears in Canadian goats and if so, how to get rid of it.
Scrapie is an internationally reportable disease. Countries must inform the World Animal Health Organization if they have it and what was done to eradicate it.
The United States had hoped to achieve negligible risk status by 2017, but it has had 20 cases this year. Half were confirmed in goats.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had reported eight cases as of Sept. 27, all in sheep.
All animals are destroyed if a herd or flock is found to be infected.
“It comes at a severe cost to the producer and a severe loss to genetics in our country,” Patterson said.
“Scrapie is not an easy disease to get rid of.”
The CFIA has been contracted to collect brain samples at abattoirs as part of the sheep program. The plan calls for testing 15,000 samples between December 2010 to December 2012.
More than 10,000 samples had been collected and tested as of the end of May.
The goat industry has unique problems:
- incomplete statistics on the number and location of goats and slaughter rates
- lack of mandatory goat identification, which means the CFIA does not want to collect samples if the disease cannot be traced back to the farm of origin
As a result, farmers are asked to voluntarily submit samples to Alberta Agriculture’s TSE testing lab, Prairie Diagnostics Services in Saskatoon or the University of Guelph’s animal health laboratory.
Twenty producers have agreed to participate, and Scrapie Canada covers the costs.
Goat scrapie appears to be different from the sheep strain, so the study could provide more information and affect the way producers approach disease control.
“If sheep are shown to have more prevalence of scrapie, then that should be a tool to prove that goats have a much lower or negligible risk for Canada,” said Patterson.
It could prove there is less risk of disease and consequently improve export and import deals.
The sheep genotype is still under study, which could determine that a similar genetic resistance occurs in goats.
It is known that scrapie is spread from the placentas of infected females and then spread to kids at birth or to other animals exposed to the fluid or tissues of afterbirth.
Males can get scrapie, but they do not appear to pass it other animals.
For more information, visit www.scrapiecanada.ca.
