When Craig Payne, DVM, was in private practice and encountered a herd with too many open cows, trichomoniasis (trich) was on his checklist of possibilities, but it was down toward the bottom. He hardly ever encountered this bovine venereal disease in Missouri.
When Payne visits with his colleagues around the state today, as a University of Missouri Extension DVM, he says trich is moving up on that checklist.
“Is trich a growing problem or are we just finding more of it because we’re testing more? I think both answers are correct,” Payne says.
Tommy Barton, DVM and director of the Texas Animal Health Commission’s Region 7, concurs that trich is a growing problem. “And, the frequency of its detection is being brought about by producer education and more testing by producers in order to protect their herds,” he adds.
Nationally, prevalence data for trich is a hodgepodge of studies conducted in various states across the decades. Jeff Ondrak, a DVM at the University of Nebraska’s Great Plains Veterinary Education Center, summarized a dozen of them. Among those he cites as the most reliable, 15.8% of test herds in California had a least one bull infected with trich, and 28.8% of Florida operations.
None of the studies are from states where trich diagnosis has increased, however. In states like Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, trich regulations have been established or revised in recent months for both intrastate and interstate bull movement.
In Missouri, for instance, beginning Sept. 1, eligible bulls moving intrastate must test negative for trich before changing ownership or possession. Prior to that, regulations only accounted for bulls coming from other states. Between March 1, 2010, and Aug. 31, 2011, trich had been diagnosed in 39 counties.
As of the end of August, Texas no longer accepts virgin breeding-age bulls into the state without a test.
Arkansas already had regulations aimed at interstate bull movement. After finding 20 cases of trich in six months, the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission enacted an emergency measure in June requiring a negative test for intrastate bull movement, too. That regulation has since been made permanent...
more, including U.S. map of states with reg's
http://beefmagazine.com/health/1101-trich-is-spreading/?YM_MID=1270400&YM_RID=
Source: newsroom - meattradenewsdaily.co.uk
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