Leveraging immunologic memory for long-term protection in the cowherd

Dr. Becky Funk, Great Plains Veterinary Education Center Author

08/27/2021 Added

7 Plays

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Dr. Funk discusses leveraging long-term immunity of the cowherd at the 2021 GSL Open House.

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[00:00:00.438](upbeat music)
[00:00:07.600]But yeah, we're gonna move into the cow side,
[00:00:11.440]the caveat is I am not Dr. Vander Ley,
[00:00:14.760]he could not be here today,
[00:00:16.260]so I am borrowing his slides,
[00:00:17.660]so bear with me as we muddle through that.
[00:00:19.780]My second caveat is I am not an immunologist,
[00:00:22.730]and there are some immunology slides in here
[00:00:24.490]that we're gonna muddle through,
[00:00:26.370]but hopefully come out with a little bit
[00:00:29.200]I'll look at some potential for cow programs.
[00:00:35.590]So as we talked about in the last presentation,
[00:00:39.840]vaccination is an important strategy,
[00:00:42.680]mostly as a risk protection strategy,
[00:00:45.000]for clients, I often compare it to insurance.
[00:00:48.080]And you'll see, in some of the studies we talk about later
[00:00:51.030]in this presentation, why that's important
[00:00:53.770]and it does work well,
[00:00:55.250]but we're investing in that protection
[00:00:58.106]that you can't necessarily handle a catastrophic loss
[00:01:02.320]in that calf production system.
[00:01:05.650]The other thing we think about is using that cow
[00:01:08.890]as a vehicle to help protect that calf early in life,
[00:01:12.590]that cholesterol immunity is what we're after
[00:01:15.620]to protect that calf.
[00:01:16.950]We all know fairly well how that works
[00:01:18.910]and how important that is to that young calf,
[00:01:21.500]but that's another reason
[00:01:22.970]to think about your cow vaccination program.
[00:01:25.730]And then ultimately we get some protection
[00:01:28.500]for the cow herself.
[00:01:30.170]We don't wanna see cows that break with pneumonia
[00:01:34.650]at any time during the production system.
[00:01:37.280]The biggest challenge in setting up cow vaccination programs
[00:01:42.610]when I was in practice is timing and logistics,
[00:01:45.840]it's a balancing act.
[00:01:47.380]We have a limited number of times
[00:01:49.300]that we're gonna be touching that cow
[00:01:51.220]during that production cycle
[00:01:52.860]and we have to tailor that program
[00:01:55.240]to fit what works in your production system
[00:01:58.230]and get you the most benefit for what we're doing.
[00:02:02.240]So big questions we answer, when are we vaccinating?
[00:02:07.400]And how are we making those decisions with what?
[00:02:11.280]So types of products, and then who?
[00:02:14.690]That replacement heifer that's not bred
[00:02:16.800]is very different than that mature cow
[00:02:19.260]that's carrying a calf.
[00:02:24.160]So this is Brian's analogy,
[00:02:26.020]he likes to compare it to Clue.
[00:02:27.990]If I have any board game fans in the audience,
[00:02:32.300]you'll understand this goal of Clue,
[00:02:36.430]is we wanna know who did it with what and where.
[00:02:40.310]So when we talk about the immune system,
[00:02:43.390]that's really what we're doing,
[00:02:44.780]we're giving them an antigen.
[00:02:46.020]So what, who are we vaccinating?
[00:02:49.300]Or who's the culprits and where.
[00:02:55.110]So it makes a difference.
[00:02:56.240]See, Dr. Hoffman touched on intranasals.
[00:02:59.913]So intranasals, are different than injectable products,
[00:03:02.370]and so that can make a difference
[00:03:04.200]in the immune system that we're setting up.
[00:03:09.120]So the question always is we go in
[00:03:12.910]and we wanna design a vaccine program
[00:03:15.160]and what's the question we ask?
[00:03:17.130]I know you've all asked it,
[00:03:18.420]you've all stood in your veterinarian's office and said,
[00:03:21.877]"Doc, do I need a modified live program,
[00:03:24.900]or do I need to killed vaccine program?"
[00:03:27.880]Who's my guilty parties?
[00:03:29.050]I know you're out there.
[00:03:30.700]Everybody's done it.
[00:03:34.760]So that's in the past always been the discussion we've had,
[00:03:38.330]which of those programs work in my system?
[00:03:42.090]And then timing.
[00:03:43.420]Hopefully you've had that discussion as well.
[00:03:45.660]And hopefully that has lent some insight
[00:03:50.820]into whether we use those programs.
[00:03:53.550]Pre-breeding, pregnancy exam time
[00:03:56.437]and we had discussions about safety of that vaccine
[00:03:59.070]for that pregnant cow and that fetus.
[00:04:01.100]And then pre-calving, same thing,
[00:04:04.550]we're getting towards the end of gestation,
[00:04:06.390]what are we after as far as immunity?
[00:04:11.580]So, in the past, the discussion has always been this,
[00:04:14.810]the safety of modified live versus a killed vaccine.
[00:04:18.860]We've probably all had this discussion.
[00:04:21.500]There's a couple takeaways on this slide.
[00:04:25.200]This is production of PI calves,
[00:04:27.950]so if any you have had the BVD talk with your vet,
[00:04:30.960]you know that PIs are bad.
[00:04:32.975]Those are the ones, those are our constant shedders,
[00:04:35.900]they treat that virus as their own body,
[00:04:39.030]they're virus factories,
[00:04:41.110]they're a hugely damaging to our production systems.
[00:04:44.840]So that shows us and this is where we picked up
[00:04:48.030]those modified live programs.
[00:04:51.080]The gray bar is your PI.
[00:04:54.340]So this is our control,
[00:04:56.610]meaning that they were not vaccinated with anything.
[00:04:59.850]So we show that we can really reliably produce PIs,
[00:05:03.160]if we don't vaccinate.
[00:05:04.930]This is our killed program in this study.
[00:05:09.650]So we're showing, this was to demonstrate
[00:05:13.060]that potentially those killed products
[00:05:14.950]were not protecting for the malformation of that PI calf,
[00:05:18.670]if we had BVD circulating in that herd.
[00:05:22.540]The takeaway on this side, these bars,
[00:05:25.570]I know these are really small,
[00:05:26.670]but the thing we're demonstrating there is,
[00:05:29.000]they demonstrated that we had circulating virus
[00:05:33.030]in those heifers, in the face of BVD exposure,
[00:05:38.110]which is really the, what we're at, what we're looking at,
[00:05:41.510]when we're asking, if we can form a PI,
[00:05:44.120]if we don't have virus circulating,
[00:05:46.000]we're not going to expose that virus to the calf
[00:05:48.930]or the fetus, we won't get a PI.
[00:05:56.140]Couple of quick immunology slides,
[00:05:57.760]like I said, I'm not an immunologist,
[00:05:59.240]but just recognize this is a representation
[00:06:02.290]of that viral particle.
[00:06:05.000]And we know that if we use a killed vaccine
[00:06:07.430]versus a modified live vaccine,
[00:06:09.140]they see that virus differently.
[00:06:11.620]The goal of the modified live program
[00:06:13.760]is to have that virus active and replicating that animal
[00:06:18.070]in a way that the animal can amount an immune response
[00:06:20.520]and control it.
[00:06:23.110]So that modified live is gonna actually recognize more
[00:06:26.310]of those internal structures
[00:06:27.870]and the immunity is gonna be more
[00:06:30.710]towards those internal structures,
[00:06:32.050]when we use that modified live
[00:06:34.490]versus classically, we think of it killed
[00:06:37.940]as recognizing external structures.
[00:06:41.170]So the way the immune system views that virus
[00:06:43.510]will be different depending on the vaccine you use.
[00:06:52.060]Now you're in well deep into my immunology abilities,
[00:06:56.670]but the point of this slide is that,
[00:06:58.680]how that animal first sees that antigen
[00:07:01.880]can have lasting impacts for how that immune response occurs
[00:07:06.600]later in life when they're exposed to a disease.
[00:07:10.260]So that's really the short summary of this slide
[00:07:15.010]and why that's important.
[00:07:21.240]So the newer discussion,
[00:07:22.580]the discussion has changed as all things do,
[00:07:26.220]as we learn more about the immune system of cattle,
[00:07:30.350]our views shift.
[00:07:31.340]And I can tell you that it's been a significant shift
[00:07:33.860]even in my practice career.
[00:07:36.878]I told students the other day,
[00:07:38.230]I miss being a new graduate because I had all the answers.
[00:07:42.014](Dr. Becky chuckles)
[00:07:43.250]When they came in and asked for a vaccine,
[00:07:45.060]I knew exactly what to give them
[00:07:46.360]because we knew all the answers,
[00:07:47.540]the farther I get, the more questions I have.
[00:07:51.490]So we started to see a trend in a lot of these modified
[00:07:55.490]live programs that we were seeing a decrease
[00:07:58.320]in reproductive performance and some of these herds.
[00:08:09.430]So there's also been a nice shift in our ability
[00:08:13.290]to find out what's happening.
[00:08:15.560]Diagnostic technology has progressed right along
[00:08:18.050]with our vaccine technology.
[00:08:19.840]So prior to 2013, we just kind of noticed a trend
[00:08:24.270]that we were seeing some times where we thought
[00:08:27.390]we were struggling with reproductive performance
[00:08:29.450]in some of these herds that had modified live programs,
[00:08:34.690]2013, we had some advances in our ability to determine
[00:08:39.160]why that was happening
[00:08:40.880]and we started to find that we had actual vaccine strain,
[00:08:45.450]viral issues in some of these abortions.
[00:08:50.180]The key here is the other thing to keep in mind,
[00:08:52.530]there's not a brand of vaccine, that's the culprit here.
[00:08:56.990]It was represented really well across different brands,
[00:08:59.530]different programs.
[00:09:01.320]So we just started to have an inkling
[00:09:03.430]that we had a potential problem.
[00:09:09.369]So I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on this study,
[00:09:12.210]'cause it's really been kind of paradigm shifting for me
[00:09:15.610]when I think about cow herd vaccination
[00:09:18.500]and it's also a little bit complicated.
[00:09:22.330]So we'll go through this.
[00:09:24.130]So this is, I know this is small,
[00:09:28.900]but this is a schematic of how they set this study up.
[00:09:32.490]Day zero is your pre-breeding working episode
[00:09:36.790]for your heifers.
[00:09:38.300]So they brought in a set of heifers
[00:09:40.060]that were ready to be developed,
[00:09:42.420]gave them their pre-breeding vaccinations
[00:09:44.930]and then followed them for 978 days.
[00:09:50.860]So we're taking them from bringing them into the herd
[00:09:55.610]to a nearly three-year-old cow.
[00:09:59.160]There were two calving episodes that were in there.
[00:10:03.600]They were on a standard production cycle.
[00:10:07.110]So what they did that was different
[00:10:09.010]for each of these sets of heifers
[00:10:11.960]was how they vaccinated them.
[00:10:14.470]So we have that control group.
[00:10:16.650]They received no vaccine all the way through.
[00:10:19.670]So they are essentially a naive cow herd,
[00:10:22.710]haven't seen a vaccine.
[00:10:25.060]We have one set that received,
[00:10:29.010]or actually both sets have received
[00:10:30.390]modified live at pre-breeding
[00:10:35.450]and then this group A
[00:10:39.200]went on your standard modified live program.
[00:10:43.730]Modified live at pre-breeding
[00:10:45.630]and then enter the cow herd as a bred cow, bred heifer,
[00:10:49.840]and then continue to get that modified live
[00:10:51.810]at appropriate times.
[00:10:55.300]Our other experimental group went on
[00:10:57.330]to essentially a killed viral vaccine program.
[00:11:03.410]So receive the modified live at pre-breeding very standard,
[00:11:08.530]but instead of continuing that program,
[00:11:10.130]as we normally would think, we normally do,
[00:11:13.550]we switched them over to a killed product.
[00:11:19.100]We calved him out the first year, we rebred them here,
[00:11:24.930]and then once we preg check those now cows,
[00:11:28.050]now second calf coming, second calf heifers,
[00:11:31.190]we exposed them to a PI.
[00:11:32.760]So we took that virus factory and we threw it in
[00:11:35.870]with these early bread cows.
[00:11:38.760]So if we're gonna create PIs,
[00:11:40.310]this is the classic challenge.
[00:11:43.020]The other thing we did is we went ahead
[00:11:45.430]and we gave them an IBR challenge
[00:11:47.790]and we didn't just expose them to the IBR,
[00:11:51.000]like they would normally be they got an IV dose.
[00:11:53.870]So if they were gonna get infected,
[00:11:55.610]if they were gonna have problems,
[00:11:56.984]they were gonna have big problems.
[00:12:04.140]So this is super busy
[00:12:06.750]and there's a couple important things to watch,
[00:12:11.390]for, oh sorry.
[00:12:13.080]There we go.
[00:12:14.220]First of all, anybody guess, so A is abortion C is calf.
[00:12:21.070]So if that gives you an inkling
[00:12:22.430]of where we're going with this,
[00:12:24.160]anybody guess, what group that was.
[00:12:31.460]They didn't get vaccinated.
[00:12:32.540]I heard somebody say it.
[00:12:34.400]So we have out of 15 head, we had four calves.
[00:12:44.750]So there's where I say,
[00:12:46.030]I'd come back to that insurance issue,
[00:12:48.940]unless you can stand to have a 73% fetal loss
[00:12:55.150]in your cow herd, I mean, if you can afford that,
[00:13:00.010]I got some real estate for you.
[00:13:01.980](Dr. Becky chuckles)
[00:13:03.690]So I do like this for that fact vaccination works,
[00:13:07.720]overall, vaccination is important.
[00:13:10.360]But the other thing, so.
[00:13:14.460]Damn, dammit.
[00:13:16.280]This is our BVD challenge
[00:13:21.210]So these ones that are highlighted red,
[00:13:24.830]we found BVD in them.
[00:13:27.950]So here's a live calf with BVD.
[00:13:31.310]Here's an abortion.
[00:13:33.670]The blue are IBR, so here's two IBR abortions,
[00:13:38.544]that we were able to diagnose of that group.
[00:13:42.660]So this is a summary that kind of brings that all together.
[00:13:45.970]Remember B is our kind of non traditional hybrid
[00:13:50.760]vaccination program,
[00:13:53.430]so we started them with a modified live,
[00:13:55.370]as we normally would do,
[00:13:56.400]and then switch them over to that killed.
[00:13:59.770]The standard killed, I'm sorry, modified live,
[00:14:04.420]where we come in and continually annually vaccinate them
[00:14:07.210]with a modified live, looks a lot better,
[00:14:11.010]but here's the character that's gonna give us problems.
[00:14:15.270]You guys towards the front can probably see that,
[00:14:17.470]but that's not an A, that's a C.
[00:14:21.500]So what does that mean for us?
[00:14:25.040]That's a live calf that we can find BVD in.
[00:14:29.800]So there's your PI that we created in this group
[00:14:32.920]in the face of vaccination.
[00:14:37.720]Now keep in mind, this is one study,
[00:14:41.580]but it brings up just like we talked
[00:14:43.600]about in the last presentation, just questions,
[00:14:47.540]we really wanna think through how we're vaccinating cows
[00:14:51.090]and it's changing really rapidly
[00:14:53.720]what we know or what we think we know.
[00:14:57.130]What is the saying?
[00:14:57.963]It's not what you know that'll kill you,
[00:14:59.800]it's what you think you know that isn't so.
[00:15:06.910]So the big picture, the big thing to take home
[00:15:09.340]is so we've always had that question,
[00:15:12.640]of do I need a killed program,
[00:15:14.060]do I need a modified live program?
[00:15:15.550]That very black and white question.
[00:15:18.360]Well, the reality much like everything else in life
[00:15:21.080]is there's a lot of shades of gray
[00:15:22.560]and that's probably where we live.
[00:15:24.890]So keep that in mind when we're starting to talk
[00:15:27.880]about cow vaccinations, and this is a long-term investment,
[00:15:31.030]this isn't a calf that we're sending off to the feed yard,
[00:15:33.710]it's gonna be harvested at 20 months of age.
[00:15:37.340]You're married to this girl
[00:15:38.520]and she's hopefully gonna be around for what?
[00:15:40.930]Eight, 10 years, and try and pay yourself off.
[00:15:45.880]So what we put in as an investment,
[00:15:48.500]when they're young to set up immunity correctly
[00:15:51.360]is really important to our bottom line
[00:15:53.040]as we go along in the years.
[00:15:56.880]And then priming conditions.
[00:15:58.690]I kind of touched on that already.
[00:15:59.840]They have that you can create that long-term bias
[00:16:02.980]or that long we can set that up to work for us,
[00:16:06.174]or we can set it up to work against us.
[00:16:09.240]So something to keep in mind when we're thinking
[00:16:11.390]about those heifers, especially.
[00:16:15.450]So that was pretty quick, went through a lot of stuff,
[00:16:18.300]I'm happy to try and take any questions.
[00:16:20.620]I'm also gonna give you Dr. Vander Ley's contact information
[00:16:24.580]because he's responsible for this, (Dr. Becky laughs).
[00:16:28.400]Yes, sir.
[00:16:29.233](indistinct)
[00:16:31.960]Yeah.
[00:16:33.350]So on the top-
[00:16:36.700]I guess, alright.
[00:16:38.170]On the top, is that an A icon?
[00:16:41.780]The A columns and a red A and then two A's and a C?
[00:16:45.970]Yeah.
[00:16:46.803]So you're saying like, so yeah,
[00:16:49.740]you gave him the pre-breeding shot, you AI them
[00:16:52.670]confirmed they're pregnant, then they were aborted,
[00:16:54.960]or how- Yes.
[00:16:56.680]The A's are, there's kind of it,
[00:17:01.970]they did keep track of where they aborted,
[00:17:04.070]so there's a little bit of difference.
[00:17:05.870]Some of them were aborted just due to the BVD challenge,
[00:17:08.710]some of them aborted after the IBR challenge,
[00:17:11.730]there is a little bit of lag in there.
[00:17:13.070]So that's where you get the different,
[00:17:14.480]the capital and little A's and things like that there.
[00:17:19.530]So that gets a little complicated,
[00:17:21.510]but the overlying message is what we're looking
[00:17:26.100]at is when they aborted-
[00:17:28.080]Did they abort quickly after,
[00:17:31.620]like early on in the pregnancy or later on?
[00:17:34.430]So like, oh, let me think here.
[00:17:41.820]So all of them with the exception of,
[00:17:45.300]I think it is there's one that's an exception,
[00:17:51.000]but they all outside of that one aborted
[00:17:53.720]after one challenge or the other.
[00:17:56.400]So we're trying to induce an abortion storm
[00:18:00.180]in the face of vaccination to see what vaccination is doing
[00:18:03.180]to see if our insurance is paying off.
[00:18:05.840]Well, what I was gonna get now was timeframe of,
[00:18:10.450]do you had a little deal about, do we run a live,
[00:18:14.010]modified live program?
[00:18:15.697]And for awhile it was, we've got 30 days,
[00:18:19.580]we better give them their shot,
[00:18:20.900]and sometimes we were giving it to him
[00:18:22.590]like 30 days before we turned bulls in.
[00:18:24.720]Yeah. We did start noticing
[00:18:25.950]we were having more opens
[00:18:27.490]since then we've backed it up like 60 days
[00:18:29.990]and we give that shot in February and don't breed till July
[00:18:32.930]and I don't know, I mean, whatever,
[00:18:34.310]but our conception rate went way up,
[00:18:36.740]so that's what I was wondering if the shot's
[00:18:40.010]still lingering in and so like AI,
[00:18:42.150]oh, I got a bred and then it aborts it real quick.
[00:18:44.520]Yeah.
[00:18:45.353]So that wasn't, we didn't touch on that very much,
[00:18:47.690]but that is a real phenomenon
[00:18:49.190]and it's something that we see
[00:18:51.030]when we give these modified live vaccines,
[00:18:53.480]it sets up inflammation in that reproductive track.
[00:18:56.470]So you are absolutely right,
[00:18:58.040]if we're pushing the envelope on that
[00:18:59.580]and we have to get it done, we've all been, I've been there,
[00:19:02.540]I've created my own cow herd myself, I should know better.
[00:19:07.620]We'd push it up and we give it,
[00:19:09.710]three weeks, 30 days ahead of breeding time,
[00:19:12.470]we are gonna see a delay in good cycling
[00:19:15.980]and settlement of those cows
[00:19:17.870]because we're, we got to deal with that inflammation first,
[00:19:20.290]before we can take care of business.
[00:19:23.640]So what's a good solution then
[00:19:25.360]if we are backing up to that breeding season timeframe,
[00:19:30.530]what would be a good option
[00:19:31.810]for those to have conversations with?
[00:19:35.570]So that's a tough question,
[00:19:36.570]but it's one that we get really commonly
[00:19:38.260]and there's two different issues there.
[00:19:40.320]So if we're dealing with heifers, that's an easy answer.
[00:19:42.690]We need to make sure we schedule our pre-breeding work out
[00:19:45.180]ahead of that time and usually we'll schedule in that,
[00:19:50.400]in this region, we're Bangs vaccinating,
[00:19:51.810]so we can get that scheduled well in advance
[00:19:53.580]and that's the important thing.
[00:19:55.280]Don't forget to do that pre-breeding vaccine ahead of time
[00:19:59.260]and then come up short on time.
[00:20:01.940]If we're bringing cows into the herd,
[00:20:03.806]that's a little different discussion
[00:20:06.470]and we may need to think about where that's gonna fit
[00:20:10.680]into the program and I'll be honest,
[00:20:12.370]that's where I got caught myself,
[00:20:14.730]brought in some new cows that were on a different program,
[00:20:16.880]wanting to get them on ours.
[00:20:18.000]I thought, oh, it won't hurt anything, just this one time,
[00:20:21.050]we're pushing things a little close.
[00:20:22.650]We need to AI in 25 days and it bit me.
[00:20:26.870]So we really got to think about, whether we have to work
[00:20:31.330]those cows in stages, post calving,
[00:20:34.120]or, if it's worth looking at a different system
[00:20:39.240]or a different vaccination program
[00:20:40.900]for that segment of the herd,
[00:20:42.570]who knows what works in your logistics,
[00:20:44.380]but we really need to think hard about it.

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Leveraging immunologic memory for long-term protection in the cowherd

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