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Eamon O’Connell: Vaccination and immunisation — one of these things is not like the other

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6 months ago

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Eamon O’Connell: Vaccination and immunisation — one of these things is not like the other

It’s not good enough any more to simply vaccinate your herd — nutrition and the animals’ living conditions must also be addressed for maximum disease prevention

A Jersey cow with her newborn calf. Photo: Gerry Faughnan

It’s been two weeks since I attended the World Buiatrics Conference and I’m still trying to distill the huge volume of information that I got from the various presentations, delivered by some of the world’s leading minds in veterinary medicine. In last week’s column, I gave a synopsis of what I considered to be the newest and most relevant thinking on calf scour prevention. Nutrition was front and centre, with a focus on the first week of the calf’s life in particular. Once I had overloaded my brain with transition milk, the impact of stress on the calf’s gut, and the gut microbiome, I moved on to pneumonia , with a particular focus on vaccination.

I attended a talk by Dr Chris Chase, a leading specialist in global veterinary disease spread and management. I was incredibly lucky to be sitting beside him at dinner in our hotel that night where, over a few glasses of wine (and a few too many, at that), we chatted about cattle vaccines, immunity and all things veterinary.

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