Are YOUR stock at risk of Sudden Death?

• Evidence shows that sudden, unexpected deaths are increasing.
• New farming practices are creating new risks of clostridial diseases.
• Traditional 5 in 1 vaccines do not cover all clostridial diseases.

Clostridial diseases have been around since time immemorial, and we’ve had vaccines to protect livestock against some of them for the past 50 years. Traditional ‘five-in-one’ vaccines do a great job of preventing tetanus, pulpy kidney, blackleg, malignant oedema and black disease.

But times, and farming practices change.

A number of other clostridial organisms – not covered by these vaccines – are starting to make their presence felt. They may well be the cause of sudden, unexplained deaths seen in valuable dairy replacement animals. Often these individual, spasmodic deaths are dismissed as ‘one of those things’ and not investigated further.

Clostridial organisms have evolved and adapted to survive in different environments – in the soil, within animals, in the gut contents. Most of the time this is a benign arrangement, but when conditions are right, their numbers can explode and the lethal toxins they release can kill a healthy young animal in a matter of hours.

Today’s farm management practices, especially on progressive and high-productivity systems, can and do create favorable conditions to ‘feed’ these organisms. Especially vulnerable are fast-growing young animals being intensively grazed on developed, highly nutritious pastures and/or being fed supplements.

It’s all about risk management, and because of their age, nutritional levels, growth rates, and intensive management, your dairy replacements are very much ‘at risk’.

You can manage this risk – protection against all these clostridial threats is available through more comprehensive vaccine. Covexin®10 covers the five ‘traditional’ clostridial organisms, plus a further five including those responsible for these sudden unexplained deaths among replacement heifers.

We suggest you speak with your veterinarian to discuss a vaccination programme aimed at managing this risk.