Jan Shepel
Associate Editor
MADISON
Wisconsin State Veterinarian Dr. Bob Ehlenfeldt confirmed this week that there are five dairy farms in Wisconsin, ranging from 50-60 cows to 1,000-1,500 cows that are under quarantine due to traceback activity from farms in other states with bovine tuberculosis.
But the chief of the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s animal health division said that so far they have not found the disease in Wisconsin. “I don’t want to call it routine, but it’s what we do. These investigations are just part of what our work is,” Ehlenfeldt said, adding that it’s not a crisis unless they find an animal that actually has TB.
The goal in such investigations — and the preference of animal health officials — is to slaughter the animals that came from the farms with the infected animals. That way any of the animals that came from those farms can be examined post mortem, Ehlenfeldt said. Then, the rest of the animals in the quarantined herds are tested with a variety of methods to clear them from “suspect” status.
In this current set of investigations, there are about 200 animals in Wisconsin that came from herds with positive TB animals.
Some of the animals, said Ehlenfeldt, trace to a dairy farm in Ohio that was dispersing and going out of business. Cattle from that farm were shipped all over the country. Others on Wisconsin’s quarantined farms trace back to a Colorado herd. “We just got confirmation on the Ohio herd this month,” the veterinarian said. “But there’s no evidence that there’s TB in Wisconsin.”
Last fall there were some tracebacks to northwest and east central Wisconsin dairy herds, he said, as a result of some incidence of the disease in Texas. “There’s a lot of movement of cattle and that sometimes, unfortunately results in this quarantine and traceback activity,” Ehlenfeldt said.
Some of the investigations become huge. Ehlenfeldt said that cattle from the Texas herd ended up in 22 states. He estimated that from 75,000 to 100,000 head of cattle were tested to find one positive.
“There’s a fair amount of TB out there and the USDA has made some changes in interstate rules. But the dairy price hasn’t improved all that much and people are looking for bargains. Sometimes they end up not being such great bargains,” he said.
Ehlenfeldt was in the agency in 1995 when a Michigan heifer was found in Wisconsin with TB. He said he remembers “what a gigantic headache” that was for Wisconsin. “I always feel that we discovered the tip of the iceberg at that time,” he said.
Nothing has changed in Wisconsin’s TB status during the ongoing investigations, he said, and it won’t change unless there is a finding of a positive animal.
