In the feedlot of the future, pen checkers with electronic monitors might scan incoming cattle for developing but as yet invisible disease and direct them for treatment.
Waving a diagnostic wand over a body might seem like something out of the medical bag of Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy.
But it is within the realm of possibility.
Scientists at the Veterinary Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatoon are already taking the first steps toward such a practice.
Researcher Dale Godson of VIDO recently completed a three-year project looking for rapid, accurate and affordable methods for monitoring disease in cattle.
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Such tests would allow producers to treat only animals that are sick.
“Most feedlots treat calves on arrival,” he said, noting many feeders believe such blanket treatment is a cost-effective way of reducing disease.
“In the current climate of increased concern about resistance to antibiotics, should there be more restrictions on their use, then that would increase the importance of having a better disease detection method.”
He said the concept might be likened to a mother taking the temperature of a child. A quick test for fever doesn’t tell you what the problem is, but does show something might be wrong.
“If you look for the organism that causes the disease then you need a specific test for each bacteria or each virus,” he said.
A test indicating a range of diseases, all of which are treatable with antibiotics, would be valuable.
The research team set out to find cattle responses to infection.
It tested the blood of healthy and diseased calves and found certain proteins are found only in sick animals.
One of them is haptoglobin.
In laboratory tests, there was a high correlation between disease and the presence of haptoglobin. Also, the sicker the calf, the more haptoglobin it had.
But when the experiments were carried to the field, the link was less clear.
At the feedlot, haptoglobin was found in animals subject to trauma such as castration and vaccine injections.
“We were hoping to use an equation where increased haptoglobin equals disease, but in some cases that equation broke down because there are non-disease situations that cause haptoglobin to go up.”
Godson said it appears there won’t be a single infection response that will be the “one size fits all” test.
However, there might be a group of responses that, taken together, will indicate disease.
For example, the team’s blood tests also showed that diseased animals tend to have higher levels of interleukin-6, a chemical messenger of the immune system.
“It will probably come down to having a number of tests. There will be a profile of the animal’s responses that you can put together and say it has fever and has high haptoglobin and it has high interleukin-6 and so something is going on.”
Godson is now deciding where to go next with the research.
He thinks that before the concept can become practical for commercial use, two changes are needed. One is new technology eliminating the need for blood tests and the other is more pressure on cattle producers to reduce antibiotic use.
He said researchers are working at replacing blood tests with biosensors, devices that turn biological processes into electronic signals.
“In a futuristic look, you might have an ear tag or implant that is exposed to body fluids … . The electronic signal could be scanned” to identify animals with high levels of the disease-signal proteins VIDO has identified, Godson said.
“That sort of technology is going to be developed.”
