Animal Health Care - An Overview

New Health Products for Farm Animals

An area where animal biotechnology has already had a profound impact is diagnostic testing. Many animal diseases are difficult to diagnose. A veterinarian often has to wait hours or days for laboratory results to confirm a diagnosis. In the meantime, the veterinarian must either withhold treatment or risk using an inappropriate therapy.

Using biotechnology, scientists are developing fast, accurate diagnostic tests for many of the most common farm animal diseases. In some cases, a veterinarian can conduct the diagnostic tests right on the farm and immediately start the best therapy.

Many of these new tests use monoclonal antibodies. Antibodies are proteins an animal's immune system produces in response to invasion by bacteria, viruses, or parasites. Each kind of antibody binds specifically with a characteristic part of a particular kind of invader.

Scientists make monoclonal antibodies by fusing two kinds of cells. One is an immune system cell that produces antibodies, which bind to part of a particular disease-causing microbe; the other is a cancer cell. The cell that results from the fusion inherits from the immune system cell the ability to produce antibodies, and from the cancer cell the ability to reproduce indefinitely.

This new hybrid cell, or hybridoma, acts as an antibody factory. The antibodies are called monoclonal because they are produced by identical "clones" of the original hybridoma - all will bind with the identifying structure on the surface of the microbe in question.

One application of monoclonal antibodies is as a test for brucellosis in cattle. This bacterial disease often causes cows to abort pregnancies, and it can be spread to farmers and people who drink milk from infected cows.

Vaccines protect pregnant animals from abortion, but vaccinated cows may become carriers of the disease. Conventional diagnostic tests cannot distinguish between the disease-causing microbe and the vaccine, which is made from the microbe. Thus, these tests cannot help the farmer determine which animals are carriers of the disease and which are not.

But diagnostic tests using monoclonal antibodies are so specific, they distinguish between cattle that carry the disease-causing bacterium and those that carry only the vaccine. With the aid of these new tests, farmers can isolate carriers to prevent the spread of infection.

Diagnostic tests are not just for diseases. A Monoclonal antibodies test to detect pregnancy in animals is so simple that a farmer can read the test right on the farm.

Monoclonal antibodies are also used in a test to detect a disease called scours in piglets and calves. Scours is a bacterial disease of newborn animals that causes diarrhea. Many of the afflicted animals die of dehydration. By providing quick, accurate diagnosis, the monoclonal antibody test for scours permits immediate administration of therapy. The therapy for scours in calves is also based on monoclonal antibodies. Infected calves are fed monoclonal antibodies that coat the offending bacteria, preventing the microbes from causing diarrhea.

Some other therapies for animal diseases are based on recombinant DNA technology. Genetic engineering allows scientists to insert one or more new genes into an animal, plant, or microbial cell. In developing treatments for an animal disease, for instance, an animal gene is inserted into a microbe or an animal cell that can be grown in a laboratory culture. The inserted gene is one that produces a natural disease-fighting protein. The microbes or animal cells become minute factories, producing large quantities of the therapeutic protein.

For example, genetic engineering is used to produce interferons and interleukin-2, natural proteins that fight viruses. Veterinarians long have used antibiotics against bacterial diseases, but they have had few drugs to treat viral infections. Interferons and interleukin-2 not only kill viruses directly, they also stimulate the animal's immune system, improving the immune system's ability to fight disease naturally.

One target of research regarding interferons and interleukin-2 is shipping fever, a disease of cattle caused by several viruses infecting an animal simultaneously. Although the animal's immune system normally keeps the viruses in check, outbreaks of the disease may result from stress during transport to feedlots or market. Shipping fever costs the beef industry more than $250 million a year. Injections of interferons or interleukin-2 before shipping may help to augment the cattle's natural immunity and prevent shipping fever.

Better Vaccines to Prevent Disease

Another advantage of recombinant vaccines is the speed with which they can be developed. "Conventional vaccine development can take 20 or 30 years, maybe even 100 years," says Karen Jacobsen, D.V.M., University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine. "This is one reason why we don't have vaccines for a lot of animal diseases today. "

Recombinant vaccines are being developed for foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious viral disease that infects cattle, sheep, and other animals. Although this disease has been eradicated in North America, it still causes substantial livestock productivity losses elsewhere, particularly in developing countries. Infected herds must be slaughtered, and contaminated ranches must be left idle for months to prevent new outbreaks of the disease.

Conventional foot-and-mouth vaccines are made by weakening the virus that causes the disease. These vaccines sometimes revert to the virulent state, and they have caused outbreaks of the disease in Europe. The foot-and-mouth vaccine made with biotechnology cannot cause the disease because, as in other biotech vaccines, the disease-causing genes have been removed. The biotech vaccine does not need to be kept cold and, therefore, can be used in developing countries.

In addition to being used in treating swine pseudorabies and foot-and-mouth disease, recombinant DNA technology is being used to develop vaccines against dozens of livestock and poultry diseases, such as scours and a variety of respiratory disorders. Some vaccines may be injected into eggs so that chickens are immunized before they hatch.

Most vaccines protect against viral or bacterial infections, but using genetic engineering, researchers in New Zealand and Australia have developed a vaccine against a parasitic disease. Farmers must destroy the meat from sheep infested with a species of tapeworm common in those two countries. The new vaccine, which protects sheep from the tapeworm, may save farmers millions of dollars annually.

Proteins for Animal Nutrition

Porcine somatotropin (PST) may help improve human health, as well as lower the farmer's cost of production. PST improves feed efficiency in hogs by 15 to 20 percent. It also reduces fat deposition, allowing PST-treated hogs to provide consumers with leaner cuts of pork. The ability to produce lean pork has enormous implications for improving human health by reducing dietary fat and cholesterol.

Another growth protein, bovine somatotropin (BST), is being administered to make dairy cows more efficient, thereby lowering the dairy farmer's costs. Regular administration of small amounts of BST increases a cow's milk yield by 10 to 25 percent. Although feed intake also increases, this feed increase is proportionately less than the increase in milk production. Studies indicate that BST can improve the milk-to-feed ratio by 5 to 15 percent.

Extensive laboratory testing has shown that the meat and milk of treated animals contain no more PST or BST than the meat or milk from untreated animals. Other tests have shown that these proteins do not act on the human body, and therefore, they are safe to eat. Nevertheless, the use of BST remains controversial. Testing is under way to make sure that animals are not adversely affected by treatment with somatotropins.

Another protein that can be administered to animals to increase feed efficiency is called growth hormone releasing factor (GHRF). While not a growth protein itself, GHRF causes the animal to increase production of growth proteins.

Improved Animal Breeds

Despite the differences in technique, the scientist using recombinant DNA has the same objectives as the selective breeder: improving efficiency, disease resistance, and other desirable traits. But recombinant DNA provides a wider array of possible new traits, since recombinant techniques allow animal scientists to insert genes not only from the same or closely related species, but also from distantly related animals, plants, and even microbes.

One possible application of gene transfer in animals is to develop dairy cows that produce more nutritious milk. Bottle feeding human infants with cow's milk is not an ideal substitute for breast feeding, because cow's milk differs from human milk in some important components. Scientists are looking for ways to transfer genes into dairy cows that will enable the cows to produce milk that more closely resembles human milk.

BIO "Animals, People, and Biotechnology." Washington, D.C.: Biotechnolog- Industry Organization, 1992.

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