New Tool for Detecting Sheep Diseases

[Irrelevant]

Wild Sheep Foundation

www.wildsheepfoundation.org

Cool idea, I think.

The only thing that caught my eye was this quote from Mr. Thorton (emphasis mine).

"Poop sniffing dogs, who knew?" commented Gray N. Thornton, President and CEO of the Wild Sheep Foundation. "We are thrilled to have another tool in the toolbox for keeping wild sheep on the mountain. Beside over abundant predators, the bane of wild sheep today is disease transmission. There is more work to do, but what we've seen thus far, our canine friends could be a game-changer."

Seems like disease trumps all other factors at this point. I mean WA hasn't lost a herd to predators, but we've lost several to disease.

 

[Oak]

Link: The Sheep 2011 study focused on (domestic) sheep health and
management and was the first study to estimate the
national prevalence of M. ovipneumonia in U.S. sheep.
As part of the study, nasal swabs were collected from up
to 10 adult ewes per flock on 453 operations in the
13 participating States. These 10 swabs were then
pooled and tested by PCR for M. ovipneumonia DNA
fragments. Operations with PCR-positive pooled
samples were considered positive. For operations in
which pooled results were indeterminate or negative,
individual ewe swabs were PCR tested. Operations were
considered positive if they had one or more PCR-positive
individual-animal samples.

Of the pooled samples taken from the 453
operations tested, 350 were initially positive for
M. ovipneumonia and another 51 were positive after
individual-animal nasal swabs were tested. Overall, 401
operations (88.5 percent) were positive by PCR
(table 1). Additionally, serum from up to 16 adult ewes
per flock was tested for antibodies to M. ovipneumonia
using an ELISA test. Serum was collected from 4,073
ewes on 408 of the PCR-sampled operations from
March 14 through June 30, 2011. At least one ewe was
ELISA positive on 85.3 percent of these operations.
Of the 4,073 individual samples tested, 1,199
(29.4 percent) were seropositive using the ELISA. The
mean within-flock seroprevalence in ELISA-positive
flocks was 34.6 percent.