Not BVD again…

The fact that we’re still going on about BVD tells you that we desperately need to do something different and better. To that end, Den would like to introduce you to ‘BVD Day’.

We’ve decided to take a different approach to BVD – to make it much easier to solve once and for all. To do this we’re hoping you will take us up on our ‘BVD Day’ offer. This is where we get the whole farm sorted on the one day. Because we now have a much better and more effective live vaccine we can do all the necessary animals with one dose and that’s it for the year.

What’s the difference with this new approach?

The old two-dose vaccines, although effective, were problematic. This is because they need a complicated timed two-dose start to get the immunity off the ground. They also need quite regular annual boosters to keep that immunity going; which for youngsters was just not happening despite all our best efforts. This also meant that future annual herd boosters were not really working for those animals because they hadn’t been primed properly.

Instead, we now want to do one single dose for everything on the farm. As a country we’ve never really made significant headway with BVD. Great for veterinary income but terrible for animals and farmers. We need to put that right and cut down on the losses on our farms by getting the job done properly and getting rid of this virus as many other countries are well underway with.

Why is this better?

You may have heard of ‘Herd Immunity’. This approach we’re proposing will mean there will be no gaps for BVD on your farm to fester and multiply because of missed doses or non-immune animals that occur because they weren’t primed properly. BVD can affect all animals from birth as it attacks the immune system. Much of our youngstock disease (pneumonia/scour) is made far worse because BVD is still around in the background. It also causes a lot of fertility problems. Many also believe it is behind some of the bigger TB outbreaks we see. This is because BVD allows other infectious agents to have a greater impact when it is circulating.

The other thing we’re going to do on BVD day is send a VetTech FREE to help administer the vaccine. We suggest, within the HRA/Edge, this should be done on the reading day of your TB test, as you will be handling most/all of the animals anyway. The vet of your farm will work with you to make sure the right animals are selected for vaccine and the VetTechs will ensure everything’s done. They will also take samples on the day for monitoring the status of the farm as we’d like to chase out any virus carriers on our farms too, as to not do so would make the whole thing futile in many respects. The sampling and analysis is also FREE!!

Please give us a ring if you’d like to switch to BVD Day; to make life simple and finally stop us all going on and on about it!