CAE/shawn

[Guest guest]

Hey - CAE - caprine arthritic encephelitis - is common goat

disease - sheep get a similar one called OPP - ovine progressive

pneumonia. These are both retroviruses similar to AIDS in viral

function. We breeders actually caused this one be become an epidemic

by feeding pooled milk to our kids to make bottle feeding easier. So

if you had one postitive doe in your herd of 50 instead of just her

kids being infected the entire kid crop would be because of the

pooled milk. The disease is generally symptom free except that there

are some very virulent strains that cause crippling arthrits in the

older animals. Can also cause hard milkless udders and a variety of

other symptoms including encephalitis in kids. The predominant

infection route is through the colostrum, then the milk, then blood

products (sharing needles - you should see the goats in the park and

their dirty dirty habits LOL LOL LOL - or placental blood from the

dam side, bashing heads etc) then other types of bodily fluids though

it is very difficult to spread just from common contact. OPP has

some different syptomology - chronic pheumonia types stuff - and has

the same infection routes though because of the coughing and phlem

everywhere there is more contact spread then for CAE.

If the late 70's breeders started pasturizing to get rid of

micoplasma - causes abortions and there are many types linked to many

diseases - and they found that they werent having trouble with big

knees and congested udders. So folks started pasturizing as a way to

manage the milk transmission problem with CAE.

There seem to be three camps in the CAE wars (LOL) one that says cull

everything (and I mean cull to the butcher) that tests positive, dont

worry about it at all and cull based on lack of sypmtomology for

disease resistance, and test and separate positives and negatives

feeding only negative milk to kids.

Its an interesting thing made a bit more complicated by our need to

bottlefeed the kids for handling purposes.

Aliza