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Our Story
Remember Steve McCarthy's posts on the alpacasite where he said one of the PI crias on his farm originated in Colorado? On Dec.1, 2005 we received a phone call telling us that we might possibly be that farm. Another breeder in Colorado brought the female in question to us for stud service in October & November of 2004, subsequently sold the bred female to a person in NY and the result was a PI cria born at Steve’s farm in NY. Both the selling farm and ours immediately had blood drawn on a large sampling of our herds. Theirs came back first and was negative except for one female that had been here for breeding at the same time as the one they sold....so it looked like we were the ones with the exposure.
After getting that fateful phone call, we spent the weekend reading everything we could find on the web via googling “BVD in alpacas” including Nancy Carr’s excellent “Detective Story”. Our stud service records showed that there were only 5 females breeding at our farm in October & November of 2004: 2 of ours, 2 from the other farm that had sold the female to NY, and a female with cria from another Front Range farm, here only for about 10 days. A phone call revealed that this particular cria had become unthrifty and died at about 7 months old. The other "outside" female did not get pregnant, but tested positive for BVD antibodies and later produced a healthy non-PI cria. Our two females both had premature crias on Aug.27 (Sandman) and Sept.5 (Snowman) that were low birth weight, with intermittent runny noses and eyes, strange suri-like fleece for huacaya out of well-crimped parents, and in general were "just not right". Sandman had an incompetent immune system and fit Nancy’s description of her PI exactly. We had already been told he would not live much longer, so we had him put down on Dec. 5 and our vet, Dr. Kim Gardner-Graff, sent tissue samples from major organs, skin and blood to Dr. Dubovi at Cornell. Snowman was healthier and gaining weight, so we waited for his results. Meanwhile we continued reading everything available on BVD and contacting knowledgeable persons like Nancy Carr, Steve McCarthy and researchers like Dr. Dubovi at Cornell, while preparing ourselves for the worst.
On Dec. 14, reports came back on Sandman as positively a PI [Persistently infected] and 14 of the 15 of our herd sample tested positive for antibodies on the serum neutralization [SN] test. Our herd and other females here for breeding had been exposed to Sandman over a 100 day period. Subsequent tests were positive on most of our herd and Snowman was determined to be a PI also. We began the very heart-rending task of calling all our 2005 breeding clients, informing them of their alpaca’s exposure, offering to pay for tests on their alpacas that were at our farm and replace their breeding. We also called those farms to which we had sold alpacas or sent alpacas for breeding, offering the same testing for those alpacas even though little risk was involved since we could pinpoint the initial exposure to a 10-day period in 2004 in the female pasture and the active disease is very short-lived.
Lest you think this is a Colorado problem, the "outside" female that had the presumed PI cria at her side in 2004 was bought as a bred female from a ranch in Oregon and if you look on the ARF website at their census, nine PI's were listed on there as of today [last update 11/15/05] not including Steve's 2 and our 2. Subsequent tests at the farm that brought the presumed PI and dam for breeding have revealed another PI from a dam purchased from the same farm in Oregon. A female bred at our farm was sold to NY and another PI at Steve's farm originated in Maine. Alpacas are moved around much more than cattle!
Charles began making graphs of all our 21 females that are pregnant, determining their vulnerability for producing a PI cria in 2006. We began making bio-security changes at our farm, pushing construction on an already planned doubling of our barn size to make stalls for our herdsires nearer the breeding females. This leaves our auxiliary barn, which is over 100 feet from the main barn, as an isolation barn for our near-term females that are at risk of producing PIs. We'll have foot baths for helpers going into that area, lots of hand sanitization gel pumps, and will not allow visitors in that area. We have offered to bring back "outside" bred females for birthing if their owners do not have isolation capability. Blood will be drawn on all crias at birth before they nurse, so the dam's antibodies will not contaminate the sample. CSU will perform the PCR tests at their lab and get the results back to us ASAP. Any PI cria will be put down immediately. A month has passed since Sandman was put down and our farm is now free from active infection and by the end of 2006 will be PI-free as well, probably one of the safest farms around with a herd testing positive to antibodies. Meanwhile, we'll require any cria accompanying a dam for breeding to be tested as PCR negative to prove it is not PI prior to coming on our farm. We'll have to make some difficult decisions, but will get through this somehow.
Why are we going public on this? It is imperative that breeders take BVD seriously. It probably has been around for a long time [think of all those stillbirths, abortions, crias that died from failure to thrive, etc.] and we were just not testing for it or performing the correct tests because most vets felt that alpacas were not vulnerable to BVD. [See www.claacanada.com and www.alpacaresearchfoundation.org for testing protocol.] We have found that most cases of BVD infection in alpacas are sub-clinical and do not involve diarrhea or any other symptom. There was no diarrhea on our farm, no evidence of other sickness or being “off feed” and Sandman was producing normal pellets even on the day we put him down.
Five weeks ago all we knew about BVD was from posts on Alpacasite and the first question from most of our customers was “What’s BVD?” In September we had BVD tests performed at CSU on a stillborn as part of the necropsy. That case just happened to be BVD negative and we thought we didn't have a BVD problem. Wrong! That dam was absent during our 2004 exposure. Please educate yourselves, get samples from your herd tested to see if you have an exposure, and consider some strict bio-security measures if you have alpacas coming to your farm to breed. The biggest threat of exposure is from a PI cria and PI crias can look entirely normal and possibly grow to adulthood. [Ours just happened to look different from our usual healthy crias.] In cattle, 93% of all BVD infections originate with PI calves because they continue to shed billions of viruses every day as long as they live. PI crias have to be eliminated. That is the secret to controlling this disease before it becomes a national epidemic.
And please, please report any cases of PIs to ARF for their census. I understand that there are a lot of known cases that are not on the census because owners would not allow them to be posted even anonymously by region! [Are we that market-driven in this industry???] ARF has two BVD projects going: one at Iowa and the other at Nebraska. They need to find out everything they can about this disease and honest disclosure on the part of breeders is the only way they will ever develop a body of knowledge about BVD in camelids.
Snowman is being kept alive in isolation and we have offered to donate him to a research projects. If ARF doesn’t need him, CSU may take Snowman and another PI from this area if funding can be found to take advantage of this research opportunity like Tufts is having with Copper Penny and Tag from Steve's farm.
In addition to the articles in the 2 most recent Alpacas Magazines and articles published in 2005 in Camelid Quarterly, we found the following links valuable in learning about BVD:
www.diaglab.vet.cornell.edu/issues.alpacas.asp
www.claacanada.com [Articles]
www.alpacaresearchfoundation.org
Our entire herd has been tested, some more than once. The costs of tests range from $10-$12 for a Serum Neutralization [SN] looking for antibodies to Type 1 & 2 strains of BVD, to $30 - $35 for a PCR test looking for the active virus. Vet charges may vary to draw, prepare and ship the vials, and ours is averaging about $15 for this service, plus overnight shipping. Regardless of the costs, we need to know the herd status and plan accordingly to isolate late-term females who might produce PI crias this year. If there is a “silver cloud” in all of this, our herd is now all positive for antibodies, has no active infection that can be spread, and all the females should be invulnerable to producing PI crias after this year…and we are able to tell potential purchasers the BVD status of every alpaca in our herd so that they will not have to go through the same agonizing learning and testing process.
Charles & Lucy Farrar
Front Range Alpacas, LLC
Monument, CO ph. 719-488-0986
www.coloradoalpaca.com
Home of Peruvians Desert Sun, Aladdin, Avanti!
And Snowmass Silver Spirit
Written by Lucy Farrar
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