Mind Yo-Nees
& Your TB!
Summer has made herself known in the greatest fashion she is capable of doing, with heat! We have had several days in the hundreds and will have many more before the summer is out, but I can say with all honesty that I will take weeks of California at a hundred before I would want to relive the days when I was in Ahmadabad, India at 112f with 90% humidity.
Yeah, I’ll take California weather any day.
No one is here for the weather report or to read about the primate desiccation that happens daily in India. Ya’ll are here for the Johnes info, and boy is there some interesting stuff here that started at the turn of the 20th century, not just Johnes. Based on what I have been reading and my growing knowledge of the era, it seems as though tuberculosis was the boogeyman for animals and humans back in the 1800s before the creation of antibiotics, and rightly so for how deadly TB was for everything! I was aware of the rampant destruction that swept through humans, but what I didn’t know was its deadly presence in the animal kingdom and how it can affect more parts of the body besides the lungs, and that it is considered zoonotic; which is the capacity to travel from certain animals to human. Wanna’ guess how it was historically transmitted to humans most often? Consumption of raw products.
I do not intend to downplay TB because it IS deadly and has taken upwards of a billion lives in the last 200 years, and according to the NIH over 1/3 of the world population are carriers for the disease with a possibility of it developing from inactive to active. Those are some big boy numbers being thrown around by NIH, which if taken at face value does sound as though it is something to be concerned about; however, the more I looked into it the less convinced I became it was something we would likely see at LBH. We bipeds cannot pass on Mycobacterium Tuberculosis to cattle, they have their own form of it called Mycobacterium Bovis which they can pass on to us, but even when they do it is rare for clinical signs to show in humans. Lastly, since the early 1900s there has been a huge push to eradicate TB from cattle in the USA and according to the USDA, California is supposedly Bovine TB-free and thus there should not be any risk of our cows becoming infected. We also happened to get our cows from closed herds, more by chance than planned.
I am no numbers wiz, but a very small risk of our milk product being infected by a disease that is for all intents and purposes eradicated from commercial herds, can’t be transferred to cattle from humans and is actively understood and recognized should at least warrant another scientific look at the benefits of consuming natural milk vs the nutritional desert that is modern adulterated milk. I don’t believe it will ever happen simply because the modern way of keeping animals nose-to-anus is exactly the conditions in which TB thrives and to raise animals in any other fashion would have less returns on the shareholder’s dividends. Pump your arms into the air with me as we chant “Capitalism! Capitalism! CAPITALISM!”
Phew, now that my unquestioning love of our current system has been expressed to its fullest, let us learn about Johnes (Yo-Nees) Disease.
Johnes is an intestinal bacteria (M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis) that is undetectable in the early years from calf to adult bovine, and what it does is it scars and thickens the wall of the small intestines in ruminant animals to the point where the intestines no longer absorb nutrient and the animal passes due to starvation of essential elements. By the time it is realized in an animal, everything has already progressed to the point where one either culls the animal or butchers it. The reason that TB popped up almost as soon as I started looking into Johnes was because they are related. Somehow leprosy is in the mix also, related like a 3rd cousin.
As an aside, I couldn’t help but notice that the similarities between Johnes and Crohn’s disease are all but impossible to ignore, but apparently I am wrong. According to the website Johnes.org, one doctor named Dalziel looked at the two and noticed the similarities, but the Johnes is a MAP (Mycobacterium Avium Subspecies Paratuberculosis) where as what causes Crohn’s disease is still somewhat unknown, but it isn’t a MAP.
Specialist believe that the bacteria enters into newborn calves through consumption of infected material, usually feces. How it works is that in stage 1 the bacteria is defecated out by the mother that just recently gave birth, or a gross birthing area, and if the feces lands on the teets of the mom or somehow is ingested by the new calf, it is as good as infected. With no way to test for it at that age, and the disease not showing any signs because the intestines are undamaged, the calf is allowed to grow up. Fast forward from birth to about two years and the now grown calf is in stage 2 and will start shedding large amounts of bacteria into its feces; however, it will still be performing well, looking good, and ready to breed. It is at that time when the carrier is creating the most havoc because of how healthy they look, coincidentallySpecialists believe that the bacteria enters newborn calves through consumption of infected material, usually feces. How it works is that in stage 1 the bacteria is defecated out by the mother that just recently gave birth or a gross birthing area, and if the feces lands on the teets of the mom or somehow is ingested by the new calf, it is as good as infected. With no way to test for it at that age, and the disease not showing any signs because the intestines are undamaged, the calf is allowed to grow up. Fast forward from birth to about two years and the now-grown calf is in stage 2 and will start shedding large amounts of bacteria into its feces; however, it will still be performing well, looking good, and ready to breed. It is at that time when the carrier is creating the most havoc because of how healthy they look, coincidentally as they are at the peak of their health and bacterial load before the inevitable decline in health.
The visible decline starts in stage 3 and is usually brought to a head by something stressful occurring. It is then seen in milk production loss, loose feces, and the overall health of the animal beginning to deteriorate. Lastly, as the cow heads into stage 4 the farmer will notice a swelling of the jaw on the cow, and their feces are completely liquid. They will die in a short amount of time if not put down, and the real roundhouse kick to the farming dream is that for every single cow that reaches stage 4, it is likely that between 15-25 other animals are at some stage of Johnes because of the one.
When Kayla and I had Azores veterinary services out to our farm to treat Cozy’s hoof rot, we also had them pull blood and test for Johnes, at their suggestion because at the time I didn’t know what it was. Every cow came back with a clean read on the blood work, which is great because I can’t just have Johnes vectors walking around shedding their bacterial load all over the place because it takes two years to die off in the soil.
It is daunting. One single unlucky cow purchase could have led to our whole herd succumbing to Johnes, and then it is years and years of rebuilding it back again. I also doubt we would just get handed two free cows again too! Regardless of what the future holds in terms of health for our cattle, I do know that having this newfound knowledge at my disposal will help me in relaying the information to people who are interested in our way of life and daily farming activities, and if learning all this helps one person then it was worth it.
Thank you for reading and remember, we sell some pretty good chicken out here!
Enlightening! Gross, but enlightening. There is so much that the average consumer does not know.