Farmscape for February 19, 2021

Researchers with Western College of Veterinary Medicine are hoping new approaches to the diagnosis of Brachyspira diarrhea will provide veterinarians with more information on which to prescribe treatment.
Brachyspira is a family of bacteria, some species of which cause disease while others are harmless.
The Western College of Veterinary Medicine is reformatting the diagnosis of Brachyspira diarrhea to identify the species and appropriate treatment and exploring the prospects of adding antimicrobial sensitivity testing to the mix.
Dr. John Harding, a Professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, says the obvious benefit is in getting real time information back to veterinarians.

Clip-Dr. John Harding-Western College of Veterinary Medicine:
Whether that is better diagnostics or more targeted diagnostics or whether that is antimicrobial sensitivity testing, that is value information that the veterinarian needs.
I think with the diagnostics we're going to try to reformat our PCR versus our culture technology along more diagnostic lines.
We don't know exactly how we're going to do this but the first question would be, "are you interested in diagnosing swine dysentery on a farm?"
That could be done very simply with PCR tests, so that's rapid turn around, relatively inexpensive and get that information back as quickly as we can.
The second question would be a little bit more complex and that could be what other Brachyspira could be present in the sample causing diarrhea.
With that we may need some culture based diagnostic tests which are certainly going to take more time and will be more involved but the benefits of that are that we would be able to diagnose what other forms of Brachyspira and potentially novel Brachyspira that could be present in that sample that we wouldn't otherwise do if we just took a very simple PCR based approach to this.

Dr. Harding notes diarrhea can be caused by multiple species of bacteria or viruses and these new methods offer potential for the diagnosis of those conditions as well.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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