Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
say they have a new rapid test for detecting bovine tuberculosis.
If it works as anticipated, it would eliminate the need for
costly and business-crippling quarantines such as the 54 premises in Alberta
and Southwestern Saskatchewan that were quarantined last fall.
It would have also saved about 10,500 cattle that were
slaughtered in the effort to keep the disease from spreading; those cattle all
turned out to not have the disease.
It’s a blood test that yields prompt results, so a herd can
be tested and cleared within days.
By comparison, 40 premises remain under quarantine in
Western Canada months after the initial discovery of TB in a cow sent from Alberta
to a packing plant in the United States.
Six more animals on that large operation spanning 18
premises with more than 10,000 cattle were subsequently identified with a TB
strain never before seen in Canada, but seen before in Mexico.
About 7,000 Canadian cattle remain
under quarantine.
Harshini
Mukundan, leader of the Los Alamos’s biomedical applications team, said they
came up with the idea of a quick test after speaking with local ranchers.
"It is
kind of incredible that when one cow is potentially infected the whole herd may
have to be culled," she said.
"If you
could have a process that you could run on all of the animals and say, 'yes,
this one has been infected' and 'no, this has not,' then obviously a lot of
that time and economic burden could be reduced."
Mukundan said
the research involves adapting a test used to detect TB in people so that it
can work on cattle and other animals.
The study was
published this month in the journal Analytical Sciences.
This is an excellent example of why agriculture needs publicly-funded research as contrasted with patents to support company research.
