Alberta ranchers affected by quarantine because of the discovery of one TB-infected cow were to meet with government officials Nov. 14 to discuss potential financial assistance.
About 35 cattle operations, including two in Saskatchewan, are under quarantine because their cattle may have had contact with the bovine tuberculosis infected cow in community pastures near Alberta’s southeastern border.
Many ranchers in the region typically sell their calves in fall and do not have the facilities, feed or in some cases sufficient water to overwinter the calf crop.
Read Also
Farming Smarter receives financial boost from Alberta government for potato research
Farming Smarter near Lethbridge got a boost to its research equipment, thanks to the Alberta government’s increase in funding for research associations.
Rich Smith, executive director of Alberta Beef Producers, said Nov. 14 that the organization is examining options for feeding the calves until a trace-out undertaken by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is completed.
“We’re still working on trying to figure out a way to move the calves off those ranches because some of those guys, they’re in a tough situation in terms of not having facilities,” said Smith.
“A number of them haven’t weaned their calves yet because they don’t have anything to do with the calves once they wean them, so it would be nice if we could figure out some way to move the quarantined calves off the farms to a secure place and feed them.”
The fate of the calves in the quarantined herds won’t be known for weeks and possibly months be-cause the testing process and confirmation of negative status re-quires histology tests, DNA tests and the grow-out of tissue cultures, Smith said.
Only the original cow has been confirmed positive, and Smith said the CFIA has learned it is a TB strain never before found in Alberta.
However, new strains are not necessarily unusual because of bacterial evolution and the fact that TB can be latent in animals for some time before symptoms appear.
The slow speed of the CFIA’s process generated criticism among cattle producers, but the agency has since put a second crew on the testing job and may get a third one.
“Apparently they’re trying to increase their lab capacity as well so that they can speed up the testing, which is positive,” said Smith.
“The pace they were originally going, it was going to take them a long time to get through the cattle, and it’s still not going to be fast, but they do seem committed to in-creasing the speed of their testing.”
Seven herds had been tested as of Nov. 8 and results are expected this week.
