Week 1

Tara and I were able to jump right into the events, meetings, and projects involved with the Michigan Department of Agriculture’s Bovine Tuberculosis Eradification Program. Monday through Wednesday consisted of reading lots of articles to familiarize ourselves with how the program is run at both a state and national level. Articles included information about zoning areas, specific tests that are used, movement certificates, and projects within the program, such as the Wildlife Risk Mitigation Project.

The project’s goal is to implement change on farms that have issues with their cattle coming into contact with wildlife, particularly white-tailed deer. Many farmers are not happy with the plan that has been proposed for their land and it is evident by the attitudes and tone we receive when making phone calls. Overall, the biggest problem seems to be that people are upset that they have not been given a choice on their plan of action and additionally, they have to spend their hard-earned dollars on a way to carry out the plan (ie. putting up fences). If they are not angry with the plan, then they are angry about the “fair market value” for their cows to be removed from the farm. The USDA offers an appraisal, which is fair market value for a slaughter animal, and most disagree that the price is “fair.”

When not sitting in on conference calls and meetings, we practiced using the USAHerds database that is routinely used in Michigan. The database contains information on every animal with an RFID, including sheep, goats, pigs, cervids, bison, and cattle. We were free to explore the database to familiarize ourselves with the program for future use.

Early Thursday morning we met with a USDA worker (Katie) from the Scrapie program at DCPAH. We drove about an hour and half away to meet up with Dr. Joe Woltanski on the west side of Grand Rapids in a town called Hudsonville. Hudsonville is where the West Michigan Processing Slaughter plant is located. Our reason for travel was to work with Dr. Woltanski and Katie to extract lymph nodes from areas of the head, thorax, and abdomen of Ohio cows that were exposed to tuberculosis traced back to Indiana.

The plant was nothing like I expected. My mind predicted a large plant with an observation deck looking overhead. I was dead wrong. The plant was small and had approximately 10-12 workers on the kill floor at one time, along with a USDA inspector. Our goal at the plant was to squeeze ourselves in on the floor and collect lymph nodes, split them, and put half into a formalin solution and another in borate solution used for culture.  No gross lesions were seen in the lymph nodes we extracted, but it was quite the experience! To make it more “exciting,” for the lack of a better word, I nicked myself with a scalpel while cleaning up some of the lymph nodes. The cut was as minor as a paper cut, but we were quick to clean it up and get back to work. 

Check out what's going on with bovine TB @ http://www.michigan.gov/emergingdiseases/0,1607,7-186-25804---,00.html