Tag: livestock

Disease Testing Labs Aim for Faster Results

  • An artist's rendition of the Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health (image courtesy of DCPAH).

A new animal diagnostic laboratory being built in the Great Lakes region will help farmers and veterinarians get quicker answers about what’s making their animals sick. The lab will also be one of only a handful in the Midwest certified to work with potentially lethal biological agents and infectious diseases. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

A new animal diagnostic laboratory being built in the Great Lakes region will help
farmers and veterinarians get quicker answers about what’s making their animals sick.
The lab will also be one of only a handful in the Midwest certified to work with
potentially lethal biological agents and infectious diseases. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:


Construction crews are putting the finishing touches on a huge cream-colored building
with green windows. It’s nestled among corn fields and campus dairy farms. When it
opens early next year, Michigan State University’s new animal diagnostic lab will test
thousands of animal samples every week. It’ll be one of the first lines of defense against
animal diseases that are spreading quickly through the Midwest. Testing for Chronic
Wasting Disease, West Nile Virus and Bovine Tuberculosis has already clogged many
labs in the region.


(ambient sound)


Right now, Michigan State’s ten animal diagnostic services are scattered in outdated labs
all across campus. Every day, the labs take in hundreds of samples from all over the
region. Some are entire animals – dead because of some disease or infection. Others are
just parts of animals – a liver or a piece of muscle.


These veterinary students are trying to find out why two pigs from two different farms
died. One had swollen joints and a high temperature. The other one was anorexic.


(ambient sound: “So have you taken your specimens already?”)


William Reed is the director of Michigan State’s Diagnostic Center for Population and
Animal Health. He says the current labs were built 30 years ago, and were never designed
to be used in the way they are now.


“For example, we need state of the art laboratories that have special air handling
capability. We have to be concerned about protecting the workers, we have to be
concerned about containment of the different pathogens that we work on. And it’s just not
proper to continue to run the kind of analyses in the kinds of facilities that we have.”


Besides dealing with various communicable diseases, the new laboratory will also help
the country build up its defense against bioterrorism. The lab will be one of only a few
facilities in the Midwest that’s classified Biosafety-Level 3. That means scientists are
certified to work with deadly biological pathogens and viruses, such as anthrax and
smallpox. Lab Director William Reed says it’s important there are more labs to handle
biological threats to animals and people.


“We will be able to address some of the agents of bioterrorism and it’s likely that we
would join forces with the federal government in addressing any introduction of a foreign
animal disease, whether intentionally or by accident. Particularly, some of the agents that
terrorists would want to use to harm animal agriculture in the U.S.”


University officials say the new Biosafety-3 lab would be safe and secure. People who
work in the high-containment area get special training and have to follow strict safety
guidelines.


There’s been strong opposition to similar bio-defense labs in other parts of the country.
So far, there’s been no sign of opposition to the Michigan State lab.


The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won’t say exactly how many Biosafety-3
labs there are in the region because of security concerns. But there are reportedly two in
Ohio, and several others are being considered in the Midwest.


Randall Levings is the director of the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames,
Iowa. He says the Michigan State University lab will help the federal government build a
bigger network of labs that can quickly deal with a serious outbreak.


“And the whole concept behind that is to have not only more laboratories that can work
with some of these agents, but the concept is also that it would be better to have a
laboratory with that kind of capacity close to the outbreak.”


Levings says another biosafety lab in the Great Lakes region makes sense. That’s because
of the large number of livestock farms, and the proximity to Canada, where there have
been recent outbreaks of animal and human diseases.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

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DISEASE TESTING LABS AIM FOR FASTER RESULTS (Short Version)

  • An artist's rendition of the Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health (image courtesy of DCPAH).

A new animal laboratory in the Great Lakes region will be certified to work with deadly biological agents and infectious diseases. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

A new animal laboratory in the Great Lakes region will be certified to work with deadly
biological agents and infectious diseases. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin
Toner reports:


When it opens early next year, the new animal lab at Michigan State University will be
certified as a Biosafety-Level 3 facility. That means it’ll be able to test for deadly
communicable diseases, such as Chronic Wasting Disease, and bioterrorism agents, such
as anthrax.


Randall Levings is director of the National Veterinary Services Laboratory. He says the
new facility adds to a growing network of sophisticated labs able to deal with serious
outbreaks.


“It could be crucial in terms of quickly defining what areas have it and which ones don’t
so that you can start putting your control measures in place to contain the outbreak and
limit its impact.”


The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won’t say how many other Biosafety-3
labs there are in the Midwest because of security concerns. However, two others are
reportedly in Ohio.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

Related Links

Officials Begin to Kill Problem Wolves

The population of the grey wolf continues to grow in parts of the Upper Midwest. So much so, that for the first time, wildlife officials in Wisconsin are starting to kill problem wolves. To date, officials have destroyed four animals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

The population of the grey wolf continues to grow in
parts of the Upper Midwest. So much so, that for the first time,
wildlife officials in Wisconsin are starting to kill problem wolves.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


The federal government recently reclassified the grey
wolf from an endangered species, to a less protected
threatened one. In northern Wisconsin, wildlife officials used to
relocate wolves
that were killing livestock. But a new survey shows the wolf
population in Wisconsin is up to at least 335 adults, and officials are
using the federal downlisting to euthanize problem wolves.


At least four wolves have been killed in the last few weeks. Wisconsin
will
soon start the process of removing the wolf from the state’s
threatened species list. Adrian Wydeven is a wolf expert with the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. He says under tight
restrictions, some landowners could kill wolves, too.


“We could issue permits…or if a wolf came on somebody’s land
and attacked pets or livestock they’d be able to shoot a wolf in self
defense.. which under endangered and threatened species law we
can’t allow that.”


Federal officials are working to remove the grey wolf from the
nation’s threatened species list within the next few years. For the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Chuck Quirmbach reporting.

Gray Wolf Protections Reduced

The federal government has downgraded the Gray Wolf from “endangered” to “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The move reduces the amount of federal protection for Gray Wolves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

The federal government has downgraded the Gray Wolf from “endangered” to
“threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The move reduces the amount
of federal protection for Gray Wolves. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Mark Brush has more:


The downlisting of the wolf finalizes an action first proposed by the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service three years ago.


Back in the early 1970’s wolves in the lower 48 states were only found in
extreme Northeast Minnesota. Now, confirmed populations are found in more
than eight states including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.


Ron Refsnider is an endangered species biologist with the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. He says the status change gives officials a new
way to deal with wolves that are killing livestock or domestic animals.


“Live trapping was the only way that those problem wolves could be handled.
Now that these wolves are being reclassified to threatened status. We’re
relaxing the protections for them, and those problem wolves… those wolves
can be killed by the DNR and by native American tribes on reservations.”


Refsnider says that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will now look at
delisting the gray wolf altogether. Delisting the wolf could lead states to
establish a hunting season for wolves.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.

Benefits and Risks of Cloned Cows

Milk production is big business in the upper Midwest. Now, the president of a biotech company in Wisconsin is milking a herd of cloned cows that he says could give the Great Lakes dairy industry a boost, but there are still questions about the health of cloned cows, and whether the milk they produce is safe for human consumption. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Gil Halsted has the story:

Transcript

Milk production is big business in the upper Midwest. Now the president of a biotech company in Wisconsin is milking a herd of cloned cows that he says could give the Great Lakes dairy industry a boost. But there are still questions about the health of cloned cows and whether the milk they produce is safe for human consumption. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Gil Halsted reports:

(Sound of milk splashing into a sink)

Just outside the milking parlor at the Infigen Dairy a steady stream of milk is flowing from a pipe into a sink. It gurgles down the drain into another pipe that leads to a holding tank. Infigen president Michael Bishop says the milk is perfectly safe and nutritious but when the day’s milking is done he’ll get rid of it.

“Right now that milk is worth 15, 16 dollars a hundredweight and we’re dumpin’ it.”

The milk Bishop is dumping comes from 23 cloned cows. He produced them by removing the genetic material from an unfertilized cow egg and then inserting the DNA from the ear of a cow he wanted to reproduce. The result is a herd of cows that looks uncannily identical. There are no regulations requiring Bishop to dump the milk from his herd. But the FDA has asked all owners of cloned livestock to keep food products from their animals off the market until the agency decides whether or not to regulate them. The FDA is waiting for a National Academy of Sciences report on animal cloning due out later this spring before it makes a decision.

FDA spokesperson Stephen Sundlof says even if the report includes no red flags on food products from clones, the agency may require tests on the milk from cloned cows before it goes on the market.

“That would be to look compositionally at milk from cloned animals and compare that to milk from non-cloned animals to see if there was any substantial differences. But other than that we would likely find that those products were in fact identical to normal milk produced by uncloned animals.”

Michael Bishop is confident the milk his cloned cows are producing is perfectly safe for human consumption. In fact he says he’s already run the kind of test Sundlof is talking about comparing the milk of his cloned cows with the milk from cows at a neighboring dairy.

“Nothing new in the cloned cows… but there were variants in the bulk tank of a neighbor dairy, so it really turns out that the food product is more predictable. It’s gonna be the same in a cloned animal.”

But critics of cloning food say there are still lots of unanswered questions. Infigen isn’t the only company cloning dairy cows and several consumer groups are lobbying the FDA to put some strong regulations in place before milk from any of the diaries using the procedure is allowed on supermarket shelves. Joseph Mendelsen is with the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. He says there are a number of potential health problems for cloned cows. For instance they may be more susceptible to mastitis, and may require more use of antibiotics.

“Are there possibly subtle genetic differences that may affect the nutritional quality of the milk? I don’t think those issues have been looked at and they’re certainly not gonna be looked at with the scrutiny I think that consumers expect if we don’t have a mandatory regulatory system looking at cloned animals and the products derived from them.”

Infigen’s Michael Bishop agrees that regulations to insure the quality of the milk may be necessary, and he’s in favor of labeling the milk from cloned cows so consumers can make an informed choice.

“Americans are used to having choices and I believe they should have this choice. Let’s let science prove one way or the other if there’s a difference and then let’s let the marketplace decide if that product is going to be acceptable.”

Critics of cloning all say labeling should be required for food from cloned animals. But they’re even more concerned about the affect clones will have on genetic diversity. John Peck is the executive director of the Wisconsin-based Family Farm Defenders. He says an increase in the number of cows with identical genes will reduce the range of genetic diversity. And that means, he says, that herds of cloned cattle will be even more likely to face problems from disease and viruses.

“If you’re basically engineering in this uniformity, you’re also engineering susceptibility to catastrophic events, which we’ve seen that with other crops that are genetically engineered or hybrids that are vulnerable to one form of blight or rust or something that comes in from afar. The big question then is, who’s gonna pay for that? You know are the consumers gonna foot the bill when a factory farm of two thousand dairy cows all gets wiped out by one virus?”

But Michael Bishop says his cloned cows will not be any more at risk for disease than the original healthy cows they were cloned from. He predicts that once cloning catches on, farmers running large commercial dairies will begin adding clones to their herds to increase their efficiency.

“Because they’ll actually be able to create a more uniform consistent product from cow to cow to cow, and be able to predict how much hay, how much feed, and exactly what the outcome’s gonna be. Is it gonna be thirty thousand, thirty one thousand, thirty two thousand pounds of milk from the inputs they put in.”

Just
how quickly large dairies turn to cloning for economic advantage though depends a lot on whether the FDA decides to impose restrictions on the milk the cloned cows produce.

For Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Gil Halsted.

Engineering a Cleaner Pig

Like most farmers, hog farmers have seen a shift from small, family-owned farms, to large-scale hog operations, but more pigs on less land creates some major environmental problems – especially, what to do with all that manure. Bio-tech researchers in Canada believe they have created an animal that will help. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:

Tracking Livestock to Limit Diseases

Those worried about food safety say it’s time for a uniform animal identification system – one that could rapidly isolate animals suspected of carrying contagious diseases. Wisconsin agriculture officials have taken the lead on this type of preventative action but will need the help of all the Great Lakes states to make it work. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Jo Wagner has more:

Transcript

Those worried about food safety say it’s time for a uniform animal identification system, one that could rapidly isolate animals suspected of carrying contagious diseases. Wisconsin AG officials have taken the lead on this type of preventive action but will need the help of all the Great Lakes States to make it work. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Jo Wagner has more.


There’s growing consensus among agricultural officials that some type of universal animal identifier is needed to trace animals from birth to the marketplace. Especially in light of recent occurrences of “mad cow” and “foot and mouth” diseases in live animals overseas and the nasty form of e coli in meat products here. Wisconsin secretary of agriculture, Jim Harsdorf says the ID system started in Europe. Now it’s moved to Canada, where it’s mandatory, and Harsdorf says Holland has a central database containing information on all the nation’s animals.


“It’s housed in one location and the producers within 48 hours have an animal ID’d after it’s born and that animal ID stays with it for life.”


Federal officials in the United States have been slow to implement such a system though, so Harsdorf says state officials are working to come up with one. It might be tied to different identification networks that farmers already use to keep production and reproduction records, herd health, vaccinations and the location of cattle that are sold, or it could be a totally new system that keeps some or all of those records on one central computer database managed by state, private or non-profit organizations.


Wisconsin state veterinarian Clarence Siroky says public feedback surprised them. State officials were expecting farmers to want only a voluntary system but what they found at public meetings was that producers want a more comprehensive mandatory system nationwide


“We move cattle all over the United States rapidly…we can have one cow at least touch 27 other states within a week…one pig can touch 19 other states within 24 hours.”


For those reasons, Siroky says, all animals will have to be included, not only cows, but sheep, horses and pigs. In England for example, cows are identified, but sheep are not, and he says sheep were implicated in the rapid spread of foot and mouth disease there.


That concerns Ted Johnson. He’s a Wisconsin dairy farmer who likes the idea of a universal identification system because it would quickly pinpoint the location of animals that might have come in contact with a disease.


“If in the event of an outbreak of some highly contagious disease, it could be stopped very quickly and we wouldn’t have to have wholesale slaughtering of cattle.”


Still Johnson says many farmers are concerned about how much the ID would cost, who would maintain the records, and who would have access to them.


“The worst case scenario would be if that information is released and there is some doubt about the information or if the information is used in an incorrect manner, the perception can be there’s a problem on individual farms.”


State veterinarian Clarence Siroky says that’s why input from farmers, processors, privacy advocates and consumers is important as the technology is developing.


Still to be decided is the type of animal ID that would be used. Siroky says it could be a tag placed on the animal’s ear. However, some animals already have so many different ear tags, he says one ear can look like a Christmas tree. Other possibilities include a computer chip or other type of recyclables monitor placed inside an animal.


Meanwhile, AG secretary Harsdorf says the records included in a computerized type of system could be very beneficial to consumers at the supermarket.


“At some point in time, you’re gonna have the ability to go through a grocery store and see up on a screen when you buy that package where it came from, a picture of the operation — it’s almost mind boggling to see what could happen down the road.”


Still, farmer Ted Johnson worries all the talk right now about the need for animal identification might create a consumer backlash.


“I feel as a producer our food supply is very safe. I don’t want the perception to be that an animal ID program is being instituted because we have a problem.”


But a potential problem without plans to deal with it could create havoc for the agricultural industry, and so far veterinarian Siroky doesn’t know when a system with wide support might be in place. He does say animal health officials are on high alert for the appearance of any contagious diseases. At the same time, he says even if Wisconsin comes up with a proactive plan, unless other states adopt a similar identification method, any tracking system would have limited effectiveness. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mary Jo Wagner.

Activist Video Sparks Food Safety Concern

Two animal rights activists who recently shot footage of chickens at two of Ohio’s largest egg farms are not getting what they bargained for. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jo Ingles has more:

Transcript

Two animal rights activists who recently shot footage of chickens at two of Ohio’s largest egg farms are not getting what they bargained for. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jo Ingles reports.


(sound of chickens)


These chickens are shown in cramped cages….often featherless from abuse…in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The activists say they had hoped the sight of this would spark an all out investigation into the way the farms treat their livestock. But it’s done something else. The head of the Ohio Livestock Coalition wants to know why the activists were able to trespass onto the farms to get this footage….especially these days when food security is a major concern.


“It’s an example of how a bio terrorist might try to introduce something to the livestock.”


Dave White is backing a plan that the Ohio senate has already approved. It increases penalties for trespassing onto and vandalizing farms. The bill is expected to pass the Ohio house the first of next year. Meanwhile, the activists are trying to get lawmakers to take an equal interest in the well being of the hens at Ohio’s major egg farms.

New Feed Reduces Toxins in Manure

Large-scale livestock operations face a big challenge: how to
handle all the manure the animals produce. Manure spills and runoff can
contaminate water with nitrogen and phosphorous. The result can be
polluted drinking water, or fish kills in streams and lakes. But now,
Purdue University researchers have found a way to significantly lower
the
pollutants in hog manure. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson reports:

Farmers Go Online

These days, all kinds of businesses — from automakers to hotel chains — are going on-line to do their buying and selling. By meeting through electronic marketplaces, they hope to save time and cut costs. And as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports, even farmers are giving it a try: