Abstract

When advising farmers on how to control Johne's disease, the number 1 recommendation is to avoid feeding waste milk to calves and instead to feed them calf milk replacer (CMR). Obviously, this advice is based on the assumption that milk replacer is free of live Mycobacterium avium subsp paratuberculosis (MAP) organisms capable of causing infection. No one has ever challenged this assumption. Preliminary work on CMR sourced in Wisconsin found that 1 of 8 (12.5%) samples tested positive for live MAP organisms by the peptide-mediated magnetic separation-phage assay (PMS-PA). Previously, 30 of 68 ( 44%) powdered milk products intended for human consumption were positive for live MAP by the same assay. The study objective was to expand the survey of CMR and to test for MAP as well as standard measures of microbiological quality.

Full Text
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