Animal - Health

Vet Peeves
Dragging feet on new drugs

Vet peeves

Throwing more medication at a problem won't solve it, says feedlot veterinarian. Finding the cause will

BY DON STONEMAN

Chesley veterinarian Peter Kotzeff has a straightforward rule for dealing with feedlot cattle: Keep it simple.

"Doing simple things right is more important than trying complicated procedures," says Kotzeff, a veterinarian with Chesley Veterinary Management who specializes in feedlot cattle health management.

His processing and treatment protocols are straightforward. As important as treating a health problem, he says, is to look at its cause.

Kotzeff has a strong concern with keeping animals healthy. "We don't look at new antibiotics" if treatments fail, he says, "we look at the cause."

Treatment and vaccination procedures "is 20 per cent; the rest is how we manage the cattle," Kotzeff says. "If there are a lot of feet and leg problems we don't look for better treatments. We look for causes."

Laminitis and hard slippery floors found in slat barns are the two prime factors producing lameness in fed cattle in Ontario, he says.

If animals must be pulled from the feedlot for pneumonia, air quality often is poor. The solution may be as simple as adding bedding or reducing cattle numbers to reduce ammonia.

If cattle come down with respiratory diseases, he looks for problem areas.

If cattle are too crowded in a barn "they start to fall apart."

Kotzeff supervises health management at the Schaus Land and Cattle Company feedlots. He is keeping a sharp eye on pens at Brentwood this fall. They are filled to capacity because cattle had to comeoff drought-stricken pastures ahead of schedule.

The Brentwood yard has a one-time capacity of about 3,000 head, housed in slatted and in both old and new style conventional barns as well as in outside yards. Cattle turn between 2.5 and three times a year and no more than two dozen die in the yard annually. Kotzeff credits the lack of disease in incoming cattle to a solid backgrounding program before they get to the feedlot. They've been in the Schaus system for a while and may have been on grass for part of a summer, or in a backgrounding operation.

One constant goal at Brentwood is to improve the feeding system. A simple ration with fresh components presented in a palatable manner works best, Kotzeff says. Depending on their size, cattle coming into the yard may get a grower ration with a low-cost, high roughage component, or go more or less directly onto a finishing feed.

Once on finishing feed, a constant intake is a goal. "We don't want any fluctuation in intake," Kotzeff says. Feed management is even more important than health protocols, he says, adding he doesn't want to minimize the importance of treatment procedures - "but there is only so much we can do with that."

Wally and Ken Schaus keep complete performance records on cattle. All groups are weighed in and out of the yard, and most have regular interim weights taken as well. Totals are kept on the tonnage of feed going to the group.

Year-round, the cattle that are kept outside are the healthiest cattle at the Brentwood yard. "I don't think you'll see one out here that has a nasal discharge," Kotzeff says.

Cattle in the outside yard have access to clay mounds, built by a bulldozer with a scraper blade. The mounds are covered with a thick layer of wood chips which provide a dry mat for the cattle to lie on.

Brentwood yard manager Dave Martin is pleased with the system because it remains solid. Cattle don't punch through the chip mat as they would with straw, he says.

© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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Dragging feet on new drugs

Health Canada's Bureau of Veterinary Drugs has been doing far more fighting than signing off on new products so that they can be used by farmers.

Approvals of new animal treatments through BVD have slowed to a trickle in the last two years since the federal government put a user pay system into place and pharmaceutical makers started paying the bureau to have new products licensed. This program has incensed scientists reviewing data on new products. They say they are no longer independent of the companies whose products are being cleared.

"There have been some things approved, but certainly not in a timely manner," says Jean Szkotnicki, executive director, Canadian Animal Health Institute, a Guelph-based pharmaceutical company lobby group.

In just two years since the new system came into place, the average time required by Health Canada to review a product increased to just over 800 days compared to 300 days, she says. According to the BVD's own figures from last winter, the number of new drug submissions reviewed dropped from 153 to 108 in 1997, with almost half taking more than 180 days. See Drugs dry up.

The backlog of submissions is increasing for all types of submissions, including both new chemical entities, and supplementary uses for products already in use, such as a new route of administration or treatment of another animal species.

This is a concern for veterinarians and producers, Szkotnicki says. Vets want to deliver veterinary medicine in a current manner to maintain the wellbeing of animals, she says.

Kelly Maloney, general manager of the Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency, says the drug approval system in general needs to be improved. "If it was made easier and less expensive for the drug companies, we would be a lot better off," she says. As a small industry, sheep farmers can't use "a long list of products" that are available to their overseas competitors. "Because we are so small there isn't much we can do," she says.

Even for major commodities, untimely approvals of some products have delayed their introduction to some markets for another year.

For example, federal approval was received recently for a lice killer that could be used to treat cattle going off of pastures and into barns this fall. Because of the late approval, the product will be introduced only in the major Western Canada market this year. Ontario farmers won't be able to access it through marketing representatives here, even though it has been cleared for use. - Don Stoneman

© copyright 1998 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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