Cattle Health: It Looks Like BVD — Is It PI?
Cattlenetwork.com
Adding to the challenge is that PI calves won’t necessarily exhibit the clinical symptoms commonly associated with BVD: profuse diarrhea, along with severe erosions and ulcers on mucosal surfaces (such as inside the mouth and between the toes). Mucosal disease is also common, which occurs when PI animals that harbor non-cytopathic BVD (a strain that doesn’t kill cells) are exposed to a cytopathic (does kill cells) variant of the disease.
Cattle with acute BVD (as opposed to PI) can also exhibit clinical symptoms, including fever, snotty noses, diarrhea and Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD). Salt in the wound comes with the fact that BVD is immunosuppressant, setting the stage for other infections to attack an already weakened immune system.
For the record, another challenge to treating BVD is the fact that there are two genotypes (Type I and Type II) of the virus, with both types containing cytopathic and non-cytopathic biotypes.
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