Smith gives Kansas Department of Agriculture animal health update

Kansas Department of Agriculture Division of Animal Health Commissioner Justin Smith, gave an update of the status of the state’s livestock health at the Kansas Livestock Associating Convention and Trade Show, Dec. 5, in Wichita, Kansas.

Smith said 2019 was challenging to his division because of various vacancies, but as of Dec. 1, it was running at full capacity. The animal health division covers a number of areas, and one particular area deals with foreign animal disease investigations.

“Hopefully you haven’t been impacted by one of these,” Smith said. “But at the same time, if you have, our goal is that you’re the only one impacted by these types of investigations and that’s by design. We don’t want this to be any more of a public issue than it has to be.”

In 2019, there were nearly two dozen cases they investigated, mostly due to the vesicular stomatitis cases in horses. The agency also had several “high death losses” in poultry operations as well as some vesicle lesions in swine they were called in to investigate.

“So we do them all the time and honestly I think that’s probably one of the greatest needs that we have,” Smith said. “And one of the larger services that we provide is that ability to do these FAD investigations.”

KDA-DAH keeps track of animal movement through CVIs, or certificates of veterinary inspections. There’s a lot of animals that move into and out of the state.

“We brought in about 3 million head of cattle this last year on a CVI,” he said. “What that doesn’t account for are those animals that one came into our livestock markets because we don’t require CVI. It doesn’t account for any of those animals and went straight to slaughter either.”

It also doesn’t account for those animals that are moved into the state illegally.

“We know that there’s a fair number of those that come into the state without CVIs,” he said.

African swine fever is also a big deal, Smith said.

“This is something that we were spending a lot of time on. Losing a lot of sleep over,” he said. “But it is something that’s a big issue.”

All animal producers in the state need to vigilant of prevention and detection of ASF. KDA-DAH is making it high priority.

“Not just swine producers, everybody needs to understand what this virus can do,” Smith said. “It is a high mortality disease, and some of the lesions that it can cause, and that we don’t have the ability to vaccinate against it.”

The number of areas affected by the disease continues to grow.

“I think probably the scariest thing to me is, is that there hasn’t been a country that’s been infected yet shown that they can control it,” Smith said. “Some of the countries, Vietnam, particularly South Korea, they’ve done a fairly good job of managing it, but they haven’t been able to control it, and it’s still spreading.”

Smith said there’s estimates that nearly 25% of the world’s pig herd will be gone by the end of 2019.

Trichomoniasis

Trichomoniasis was another disease Smith and his division had to deal with in some parts of southeastern Kansas. Several ranches had some calf losses and some open cows because of trich.

“There was 39 bulls we ended up having to take out of the population because of trich,” he said. “But we did have a couple isolated ones there in the south central region. So trich still is an issue.”

Smith is thankful for the rules regarding trich the state has in place, and are able to trace the affected animals back to the source.

“It’s one of those things that I still think we need to be vigilant on that aspect of it,” he said.

Vesicular stomatitis

Vesicular stomatitis made history in Kansas in 2019 as the first case was recorded in the northwest part of the state.

“It’s a viral disease of our ruminants, but it’s also a viral disease of our equine industry,” he said. “And the reason that is important is because clinically or visually, you cannot discern this from foot-and-mouth disease. The symptoms are exactly the same. The only difference is it affects horses and foot-and-mouth disease does not.”

KDA-DAH still responds to VS as a foreign animal disease with the horse industry. In 2019, the nation dealt with the largest outbreak of vesicular stomatitis.

“This has kind of been a cyclical disease. The last time we had a major outbreak was in 2015,” Smith said. “Kansas, to our knowledge, we’ve not had a case of it until this year.”

Three horses in Sherman County, Kansas, were quarantined until their release Nov. 4. This was impactful, because Canada has a mandatory quarantine on any state that has a VS case for 30 days; 21 days post removal of quarantine.

“So Nov. 23, people are free to export animals to Canada,” Smith said. “That’s the one that was probably the most impactful.”

You can run but you can’t hide

Kansas also had a case of equine infectious anemia in 2019, where a horse came up positive in southwest Kansas. The isolated case was euthanized.

“But what was really ironic on this is that once we started printing the pictures, Colorado looked at them and thought the horse looked familiar,” Smith said. “In 2018, they had a horse that came up positive and disappeared.”

A leftover blood sample gave the departments the opportunity for a DNA test.

“Sure enough, it is the same horse that we did,” Smith said. “We did get it off the landscape. But it is one of those that the system kind of worked on that one. We did find that horse.”

Be watchful of these diseases

Another disease on the radar was rabies. Several cases in equines and cattle presented themselves. Most times they show up in “really funny ways.”

“Just keep in that in the back of your mind,” he said. “I think one of these horses had colic showed up as a colic, and then the other showed up as a lame animal. But they progress and they progress to death.”

Tuberculosis testing has been going on, Smith said, and Kansas is currently tuberculosis free. A couple of facilities were subject to testing this year after a dairy calf raiser in Texas had to be tested.

“Because of that we have to do a testing protocol or herd management plan,” Smith said. “So that plan is if they have to go through four rounds of surveillance testing on a six-month basis. We go down to do a whole herd test every six months. And then we have to do a whole herd test every year for five years before we can deem these animal and these herds as free.”

There are about 9,000 animals to be tested and it’s quite a process, he said. The animals get an injection, and officials return 72 hours later to read. If anything shows up positive, they repeat the process.

“Our goal is to get into these dairies and do the testing and not impact it,” Smith said.

For more information about diseases in Kansas, visit https://agriculture.ks.gov/divisions-programs/division-of-animal-health.

Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].