Courtesy of Danielle Langloism, Wikipedia CCLJohne’s disease – Watching them waste away
If you raise dairy cattle, Johne’s disease is a fact of life but for goat people, it often comes as a surprise.
Johne’s is a highly contagious, incurable, wasting disease that’s often difficult to diagnose and rarely is in the top list of things you may suspect is making your goat ill.
Although there is a great deal of information available on the internet with regard to Johne’s, it is geared toward dairy cattle and is often confusing so I have included as many salient goat points as possible here.
Johne’s is transmitted fecal to oral, generally from doe to kids during nursing, although it can be passed through eating contaminated food. It results in a thickening of the intestinal wall which means the goat can’t absorb nutrients no matter how much it is eats.
Normally this disease is accompanied by runny diarrhea, which is what normally leads a person to a Johne’s diagnosis. However, in a fair number of cases, even goats with advanced Johne’s won’t seem overly sick. Due to its long incubation period, animals infected with Johne’s will not show symptoms until 2 or more years after exposure to the disease. It is less likely for an animal to be infected once it’s older than 6 months but if exposed to Johne’s infected feces, older animals can also become infected. Once an animal has passed to the clinical phase, Johne’s is always fatal.
Two dianostic tests can diagnose Johne’s. The blood test returns unreliable results. I’m told that a negative result is only 60 percent accurate, whereas a positive result is 90 percent accurate. The fecal test is much more accurate but can take up to 16 weeks for tests results, during which time the animal is starving to death.
A positive Johne’s fecal test is reported to the state governing body and will require additional future testing of existing livestock in order for the farmer to be removed from the Johne’s list. In some states being a Johne’s positive farm limits the farmer’s ability to sell livestock or transport it to another state.
In the absence of diarrhea, rapid weight loss is the primary symptom. Tooth grinding, a sign of gastrointestinal distress, in addition to the weight loss should bring Johne’s to mind and lead the goat raiser to have tests conducted.
Because goats are prone to worms, most goat people automatically assume worms are the problem when there’s weight loss and rumen pain. This is a reasonable assumption, but if wormers have been administered or a worm count taken and found low, then test for Johne’s immediately.
In order to help prevent the spread of Johne’s, infected does should not be bred. It’s my position that any infected animal, clinical or not, should be culled from the herd.
Although I’ve been told that meat from a non-clinical Johne’s animal is assumed to be safe for consumption, I won’t sell it or eat it. Research is underway to determine whether there is a link between milk from Johne’s cows and Crohn’s Disease in humans, so I’d rather take the loss financially and cull the goat than risk someone’s health by selling them meat or milk from that goat.
Because of the way Johne’s is spread and the speculation regarding its link to Crohn’s, milk from a Johne’s animal should not be consumed. The animal needs to be segregated until test results come back so as to limit the possible transmission of the disease to other livestock. Unlike many other diseases, Johne’s is not species specific so cattle can catch it from goats and vice versa. Johne’s is not contagious to poultry.
Johne’s is incurable and the only way to avoid further spread to other livestock is to remove all shed (infected feces) from livestock living and eating spaces. The disease can live for more than 200 days in soil and for more than a year in water, so cleanliness is crucial.
You can’t disinfect a pasture, but separating clinically diagnosed animals substantially lessens the chance of passing the disease to uninfected animals. Any kids born to a Johne’s-infected doe, or a doe suspected of having the disease, should be bottle fed with milk from other does so as to prevent the spread of infection to the kids.
— Naimhe Jeanne
