Dr. Amardeep Khushoo & Omar Sanchez from UBRL Livestock Diagnostics join the Texas Mini Milkers Education Series to discuss Farm Biosecurity, Goat & Sheep Diseases of Concern – Herd Health Testing, Collection & Shipping Goat Blood Samples to the Lab – Do’s & Don’ts, Blood Samples Processing Steps in the Laboratory, and Laboratory Safety & Quality Assurance.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: All right, welcome, everyone. Kerry with the Texas mini Milkers and host of the mini dairy Goat podcast. We again have partnered with the education committee for the Texas mini Milkers, and we are bringing you guys a really great educational webinar today. So I’m going to turn it over to Michelle Taub. She’s our education chair for the Texas Mini Milkers, and she’s going to introduce our guest speakers for today. Michelle. [00:00:32] Speaker B: Hey, thanks, Kerry. Yes. So I’m really excited that Doctor Kashu agreed to do this because I’ve been using UBRL since we really started with goats. So our main speaker is Doctor Khushu, and his guest speaker is his lab manager, Omar Sanchez. And I speak to Omar a lot on the phone, and I’m really looking forward to learning how they do things. And, of course, you know, more of why we should do these things. So, Doctor Khushu, it’s all yours. [00:01:10] Speaker C: Thank you, Michelle. So I’m really happy to talk about some of the things that you see on the screen. Basically farm biosecurity, why herd health screening is important, what diseases. We should think about how pregnancy testing works as well, since we are here. So the goal is to get some basic information out there with the good community and try to, you know, do some outreach. I have Omar Ridbi. Hello. So we’ll be going over slides and we will be sharing the stage as we go, and we will answer the questions at the end. So let’s of move to the first slide. The. So here are the areas to be covered today, as I said, farm biosecurity, bird health testing, collection and shipping samples to the lab. What to do, what not to do. Omar will talk about that a little bit. What are the steps in processing in the laboratory? So you can see the other side of the processing that happens here. What does lab safety and quality mean? And then question and answers. So just to say this, that of course, we took some slides from the Internet, some pictures and images, and we don’t own them. This is just for the purpose of education and providing outreach. If we have some references in there, but some are not labeled. If you need more information on the references, we can always provide those as well. So starting from UBRL, we were actually a human diagnostic lab when we started in 2014, and we added the livestock division in 2015. And so this was more not by design, but, you know, cylinder participants, but our mission with livestock is to serve and empower our producers and veterinarians to maximize individual animal health, but health as well, to achieve high productivity, public health, safety and sustainability. Our overall goal is to eradicate all these diseases from United States. Someday we’ll use that. Our core values are we want high quality outcomes for our clients. We want evidence based diagnostics, timely work, cost effective work, highly communication work. And of course, client centeredness is the most important thing for us. So what does biosecurity mean? It refers to measures that we take to prevent, introduction or spread of spread of harmful organisms. It could be bacteria, as you see on the left, viruses in the middle, and parasites, or fungi and protozoans on the right. So our goal is to minimize these risks of transmission of these infectious diseases. They do happen, or they do appear on properties and in farms in various places. And we want to minimize them and we see them in agriculture. These measures are aimed to protect food crops, our livestocks from pests, invasive species, other organisms that are parasites and are not conducive for welfare of humans and the animals we have. So, if you think about biosecurity, a lot of people have maps and they already plan and have a biosecurity plan. So one of the things is to identify a livestock disease of concern. What are those? Because they can spread in the whole herd and create a bigger problem. So nip them in the bud. Well, prevent first, but if you do say something, how to prevent it from spreading as well? So what are the various risks to your employees, as well as visitors that come to your farm? How can they be a risk and how can you create a risk for them? For that, we prepare maps, we mark areas, we make sure that we have biosecurity plans in place. We have good farm management practices. Of course, we are not going into details with that. These were just some of the steps we listed and have good protocols overall. We have to keep in mind what are the inputs that come into the farm? What are the outputs we take from the farms? What are the ways people, vehicle, equipment. Typically we call them fomites, things that can influence and cause infections to spread our practices for production. And also how do we record things. The overall goal is to have good cross sectorial biosecurity plan, so we can improve public health, we can improve agriculture, we can improve the environment, and we can enhance our business or production as well. So, first things first, we’ll talk about some of the diseases that we typically are concerned about, especially with goat and sheep. We’ll talk about five diseases as such, very briefly. And if you want more information, we can provide details later on as well. So the first one we are going to talk about is CAE. I think most of the people have heard about this disease. I would say this is the most common or pregnant disease as well. The second one would be OpP, which is very similar to CAE. The third one is gaseous lymphadenitis. Fourth is unis, and fifth is q fever. I would say brucellosis is important, too, and that kind of completes the panel, but we don’t offer that test, so we are not going to talk about that. But if you need more information, we can always provide that, too. So let’s start with CAE. So you can see that virus on the right. That’s basically the CAE virus. It’s a lentivirus or it’s a retrovirus, which basically means it’s a single standard rna virus. So this is a group of virus, actually a family called small ruminant lentivirus, SRLV, and CAE and OPP are part of the same family. So we test for this virus in goats, and they can also infect sheep. And likewise, OPP can affect sheep and goats, too. So the typical symptoms that you see, that’s clinical signs. On the right, you can see a goat with a arthritic joint or arthritis or polyarthritis. With young kids, it can cause encephalitis, where you’ll have a lot more head movement and shaking. With older animals, you’ll see more arthritic outcomes. Most animals show no clinical signs of the disease, but can be persistent carriers. That’s why you have to test and screen. And the biggest mode of transmission for CAE is vertical. That means through milk or colostrum, from mom to babies. But there are ways it can spread horizontally, that is, from one animal to another animal that’s not related, but in the same vicinity. Respiratory secretions can harbor infectious viruses and can lead to infections. So we do need good management practices and reliable diagnostic tools to make sure that, a, we prevent, b, we control the spread of disease. So that was CAE and OPPV. The second one is caseous Lymphadenitis, or cl, commonly known as cl. Now, this is caused by cornebacterium pseudotuberculosis, that’s a bacterium. And you can see on the right, you’ll see various locations that are listed in red dots on that goat. But you will see on the second picture, you can see, actually Scl abscess that’s ripe and ready to burst open on the goat. So it is characterized by abscess formation in near or major peripheral lymph nodes. If it’s external, or it can be internal as well. It can be in the internal organs, it can be in the lungs, it can be in the viscera, it can be in the liver. So external forms are more common in goats. Internal forms are more common in sheep. It’s not a curable disease. It does lead to economic losses, including death, condemnation. So your carcass can be rejected if it’s spread, or it’s kind of spread in the inside the body. It can reduce the quality of height or the wool, loss of sales of breeding animals. And you may have to cull some animals if you want to get rid of this problem. So you don’t want this problem in the first place. It has zoonotic potential, so it can infect humans as well. So that’s why whenever you are handling any animal that has a clapsis, make sure that you are gloved up and you have all ppe to protect yourself. And this bacterium can also survive in the environment for a long time. So we would not want to have environmental contamination. So you don’t want any abscesses to burst open into organic matter, basically. And if you have questions, we can talk about that too, because it’s harder to get rid of this problem if it gets into the environment. At the bottom you can see elong abscess showing a typical yellow green bus. So that’s the internal abscess, as I said, it can be internal or external. And the herd should be routinely tested, and we have a test for that. And the animal may not show obvious or clinical symptoms for a while. So it can stay latent for a while, even after the animal got exposed. So that’s why routine and annual testing is important. So next disease I’m going to talk about is yonis. This is caused by mycobacterium paratuberculosis. You can see the picture of the bacterium on the right. It’s a slow, progressive, contagious and untreatable disease. It infects cattle, goat and sheep. So if you have cattle, there is a possibility of cross species exposure. So it does lead to weight loss and diarrhea, which is more pronounced in cattle. With goats, they can look healthy, but they still may be carrying the pathogen for a long time. And then eventually they do show the signs. As you can see in the picture, the incubation period can be from months to a few years. Animals can become really weak in the later stage of infection. But for goats especially, they may not show that early on. Again. This bacterium spreads in the environment through feces for the most part. And then again, and this bacterium can survive in the organic matter for a long time, like Cl. So we don’t want environmental contamination of unis in your property. It can be introduced in a new goat, cow, sheep, and other through manure. As I said, that’s the most common way it spreads. And death may occur in some infected animals or at some stage in point. But your animals may look healthy and plump, and they may look all right, but they can have unis, especially in the initial stages. It won’t even show. So testing is important. And knowing doing your herd screenings are important for your knees as well. So the first disease I want to talk about is q fever. There’s a small image of bacterium. The more important thing about q fever is, well, it’s caused by Coxiella Burnetti, but, and it infects many animals. But we are here focused on livestock. So we’ll say goat, sheep, and cattle are the pathogen hosts for this pathogen. It is found in birth products. So placenta, amniotic fluids, urine, feces, milk of infected animals can all carry this pathogen. If the animal was infected, people can get infection by breathing in just dust, because this bacterium can aerosolize. So this can get into the environment by air, not just, you know, water or soil. And that’s where it becomes a little more. It’s not only more infectious, it’s also more risky in that sense, because it can spread through air. So I have some data here showing incidence in humans, because we have had some of our clients, and unfortunately, that have got exposed to Q fever, or they have had some chronic Q fever issues. So, just in the interest of people, I wanted to share, and I think people know least about Q fever in these diseases. So this is the data. You can see the map of United States. That’s incidence of Q fever per million population reported in us. So, important thing is 36% of human cases that have been reported are in from three states, California, Texas, and Iowa. So we are where we are and where you guys are, we are high incidence places. So to be extra careful for that. And more cases of Q fever are reported in older people, especially men. That’s probably an occupational hazard, too, because Q fever also spreads through cattle and all that. So, and a lot of, you know, men work in big cattle groups or industries. So if you are a person with having endocarditis or heart issues or health issues, weakened immune system or pregnant, you have a higher risk of infection and severe disease from Q fever. So something to be really careful about for people who work with livestock. So the other test that we do is a pregnancy test. We are a bioprint affiliate lab for that. So one of the requirements for that is your goat or sheep should be 30 days post breeding when you are testing for accuracy. If they are under 30 days, it may not be as accurate because we may miss some pregnancies. Usually if it’s close to 20 days or lower, then for sure there’s a higher chance. As it gets closer to 30 days, the accuracy improves. 30 days or more is the most accurate test. So what we test in pregnancy is a pregnancy associated glycoprotein. It’s called pregnancy specific protein b. It is created by the trophoblast cells of the placenta. So as the pregnancy matures, this protein secretion happens and it accumulates over time. And that’s what we are measuring. The test does not really tell you anything about gestation or, you know, how far along the animal is, but it is a yes or no kind of a test. And if you have questions, we can talk about that. Your cattle, goat and sheep can be tested for pregnancy using this test in the lab. This is a schematic for how the test works. So it’s basically a little more technical, but very simply, say so you have a plate where you have an antigen. Antigen will be part of a molecule that is part of the pathogen. That means part of the bacterium or the virus that you are trying to look for and investigate. So we coat a plate with that protein, usually, and then we throw antibodies from your blood sample onto that protein and try to see what clings onto that protein. If you do have antibodies against that pathogen or that bacteria or that virus, then the antibody will get stuck there and we can develop that reaction and see in what cases or in which cases did the antibody get stuck. And that kind of tells you, okay, oh, there was a detection of antibody in the blood sample. You can also have the reverse thing where you’re detecting antigens. Antigens means part of the virus or part of the bacterium, and antibody means anything that has reacted to it and is in the blood. It’s a multi step process, and it kind of gives you coloration, as you can see. And what we do is we measure that color in the instrument called spectrophotometer, and then that gives us variation in readings and helps us interpret the results and give you a diagnosis or status of your animal. So that’s kind of about the disease and about testing. Now, Omar will talk about the next session. [00:18:03] Speaker D: So I’m basically going to go over kind of the processes of what we do here in the lab and what to expect whenever you’re sending samples over here. So first things first. Even on our website, we have a picture by picture kind of diagram guideline that kind of shows you how to collect the sample and ship it to us. So typically the most important thing is that you collect it on a red top tube or there’s other also serum separator tubes or tiger top tubes. But the most important part is that it’s the red top tubes. Every once in a while we get lavender tubes and there’s only a select test that we can run on those and there are some that we can’t. So we have to reject testing for some of those. So just make sure that you’re collecting the right red top tube. And if you have any questions about that, whenever you’re sending to us, you can always just send the photo, take a photo of the tube and just email it to us and we’ll let you know if it’s good or not. But basically you’re going to want to collect at least one ML of serum or one ML of blood once you collect it. Try to ship it within a day or two from when you collect it. If you’re not going to ship it right away, just throw it in the refrigerator. But just make sure that it’s important that you don’t freeze it. Just keep it in the refrigerator. Just keep it cool in there. Once it’s ready to ship, you’re going to want to bundle everything and no more than ten tubes per bundle. You’re going to wrap everything in paper towels, newspaper or anything like that. Basically just enough paper towels to kind of absorb the blood. If anything leaks or breaks during transit, you’re going to then place that in a ziploc bag for the exact same reason, just in case anything leaks or breaks. You don’t want it spreading outside of the box, depending what tests you’re doing. If you’re only going to do the pregnancy testing for go cheaper cattle with us, you do not need an ice pack in there. It’s not required. If it’s scorching hot outside and you want to throw one in there, you can throw a small one in there, but generally those are good. If you’re going to do any of our disease testing like Yona, CLC and Q fever, then you’ll definitely want to throw at least one small ice pack in there. You don’t need a styrofoam cooler or anything like that. If you’re not going to send a lot of samples, but basically you’re just going to have your samples in a ziploc bag with the paper towels, your ice pack and its own ziploc bag because of the condensation from the ice pack. And then you’re going to fill out a form that you can also get from our website that will have your contact info on there and the names of the animals, what tests you want and everything on there. You’ll stick it in a small cardboard box. Every once in a while people will send them in padded envelopes and we usually don’t recommend doing that unless you throw it in a box first. We’ve gotten a lot of tubes that have been broken during transit because they’ve been put just in padded envelopes and that’s it. And we all know how shipping carriers treat all that. So usually we also recommend using ups or FedEx. FedEx ground or ups ground is perfectly acceptable. Three to five day shipping is kind of what we ideally want. And then seven days in transit is the max. Post office is what we get the most of. But just be aware, we also get the most issues with post office, just depending where you’re at. I know you guys are in Texas, so just if the weather is not doing so well, post office doesn’t tend to do so well. Or if we’re near a holiday, post office doesn’t do well. Sometimes it’ll take 1314 days to get here and I generally don’t have that issue with UPS or FedEx. The most I get is like a day delay. The other thing too, that I forgot to mention, when you do collect your sample, the most important thing too is to make sure you label everything correctly as you’re collecting. So you’re going to want to have your animal id on there. And that would just be whatever you call the animal. And then you’ll have a tube number. The tube number you’re going to get from the submission form. So let’s say you have five samples. It’s just going to be 12345 on the tubes, just so we can put everything in the same order. And then on the outside of the box you’re going to make sure that you write exempt animal specimen every once in a while. I have some clients that call and say that UPS or post office is not wanting to accept the package. So just make sure you let them know that it’s an exempt animal specimen package. It’s considered a category b and you can even google it and pull up the post office website or UPS website and just show them right there that they should be able to accept it. You’re not doing anything wrong. This is how it’s done in every single lab. It’s just sometimes they have new employees or they’re just not used to getting blood samples. So they’d rather say no, then accept it. Um, and then the last thing you would want to do is once you do ship it off, if you can just email us saying, hey, I sent this many samples for these tests and give us a tracking number that lets us know to keep an eye out for your package. And just so we can kind of have an idea of our volume for the week, some other important things too, is make sure you do not use dry ice. Those will freeze your samples and it makes it more difficult for testing for that. So just make sure you only throw a nice pack in there and then I’m going to go to the next one. So we do have collection kits available on our website. You definitely don’t need to get them from us. The most important thing is that you get red top tubes as you’re seeing right there on the slide. So we do have the double sided needle option, a syringe option. Usually we recommend using syringes if you’re kind of new to collecting samples. A lot of people have more difficulty with the double sided needles, and syringes is a little bit easier if you’re kind of new to it, but it is on our website. And like I mentioned before, if you want to get them anywhere else and you’re not sure if you’re getting the right ones, just take a photo, a screenshot, and just email us and we’ll let you know if it’s good or not for us to use. And I’m going to go ahead and play a video right now. And if you can’t hear anything like that, please let us know. [00:24:17] Speaker E: Hi, my name is Omar and I’m the lab tech manager of the lab. This video is going to show you how we process samples in the lab. Most of the samples come in the mail, but we do get some that are dropped off in person. Most of the samples are sent as whole blood or in serum separator tubes where the serum is separated. Both are acceptable, but if they do come in whole blood, as seen here, we have to put them inside a centrifuge so that we can separate out the serum. As you can see here, the one on the left is how it looked like before when it was whole blood. And the one on the right is after with the serum separated, it looks a lot clearer. Once we’re done recording all the submissions that come in. And we put everything on a plate grid. You can kind of see it there on the paper. Everything is labeled by animals, so we know the placement, where to put it. On the 96 well plate. So each one of those little circles on there is one sample. We also have to put in controls in each spot. Having this playground ensures that we’re putting the correct sample on the correct spot, and there’s no misidentification issues when we’re reporting. After we’re done loading the samples, we have to allow some time to incubate in the plate, and there’s going to be different steps with different reagents along the process. So there’s a washing step and adding TMB stock and other different things that my director will probably go over with you. At this step in the protocol, we are washing the play a couple times for different ad tests. We do different amounts of washes. It all just kind of depends. At this step, we have already added the TMB and let it sit for a while. As you can tell, the really, really dark blue spots right there that are circled, those are where the positive controls are. We’re not done yet. We still have to stop the reaction to make sure it doesn’t continue developing. Once we stop it, then we’ll be adding it to a spectrophotometer, which will see here soon. That spectrophotometer will give us the exact reading. This machine right here is a spectrophotometer I mentioned a little while ago. So a spectrophotometer measures light intensity as a function of wavelength. In basic terms, it just. The stronger the color in the weld, the higher the concentration will be. And the more clear it is, the lower the concentration will be, the higher the concentration, just depending on what test it is, it’ll tell us whether something’s positive or negative. So right here, you’ll see the exact numbers. The red circles here indicate where the positive controls were. In this case, for Jonas, everything was negative. There is a little bit of color on some of them, but after we calculate using our software, it still came back negative. Once we run all those calculations, we plug everything else into reports and it’s all ready to go. In this case, this is just a sample. It’s not an actual client. Everything came back negative for yonis. Samples are normally emailed, but sometimes people want by fax or they want us to just call with results. This completes our sample process video. Thank you for listening. [00:28:23] Speaker C: All right, so after that. [00:28:25] Speaker D: Hi, Mike. [00:28:27] Speaker C: So here are some examples of things, I think one more issue. [00:28:32] Speaker D: So right here on the left, we have the submission form that I was speaking about before that you can get on our website. So this is a requirement. Whenever you send any examples to the lab, you definitely should fill out one of these. Basically, it’s just a generic information. So just the contact info, how you want the report sent to you, what type of animal it is, if it’s goat, sheep, cattle, and then how many samples you sent, the names of the animals on there. We write animal id and then what tests you want for each one. And as I mentioned before, right to the left, that tube number right next to the animal ids, that’s the number that you’re going to put on the tube itself. So whenever you’re sending 1020 samples at a time, it’s very important to have those two numbers written on the tubes as well. It helps us put everything in the same order as your submission form. It’s also a second identifier because we do get a lot of samples. The chances of another bob goat or billy goat from another account is very common. So having a billy goat named one on one tube and billy goat number four on another kind of helps us as well. And then we also have our pricing and schedule that you can also find on our website. They’ll basically let you know whenever we run our tests, which the most common ones are the biosecurity screen, which includes CLC and Yon S. Those are usually started Thursday noon. We usually tell people to try to get those samples in by either Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning if they want results by Friday because we only run those once a week. Generally there is other tests on there that you can look over, but everything’s on there. You can look at what tests we offer, even for cattle. We also have some for equine that we didn’t mention. So you can go on there. And then there’s also the pregnancy testing as well on there. We don’t charge a setup fee for pregnancy, even if you send one sample. So it’s just $6 even. Sometimes people will have questions on how the setup fee works. And it’s basically if you have, if any disease test has four samples or less, then we’ll charge a $10 setup fee, but we only charge $110 set of fee max for submission form. So, for instance, if you send two samples for Cl, two samples for CAE, and two samples for Jonas, that’s just going to be a $110 setup fee, not three setup fees, and then vice versa. If you send ten cae, but you still send one Cl, we’re still going to, we’re still going to charge a set of fee because CL was under five samples. And if you ever have questions beforehand as well about pricing, we can give us a call, email us. Sometimes we’ll respond to some emails after hours and we’ll let you know the final price. Generally people like to send a check, but there’s also the option of just sending the samples as is. Once we get the samples here in the lab, we can invoice you by email and you just pay online with any PayPal, debit or credit card or anything like that, as well. As long as you pay before we’re scheduled to report, there shouldn’t be any issues there. [00:31:43] Speaker C: All right, so the other thing we need to think about when we work in a lab is lab safety. So lab has to have a risk management protocol just like you have farm management protocols. So point is to identify any issues, analyze, create action plans to improve on issues, or figure out any problems, monitor your activities in the lab and control for that. The lab does have a lot of risk issues. For example, there are sharps, there are heat hazards, there are glasswares, there are electric hazards, there are eye wash because you can squirt solutions into your eyes. That’s why you have protective coverings and lab coats, gloves, eye protection. But you need to have stations where you can wash your eyes in case there is a fire. You have to have fire extinguishers everywhere as per code. You have to think about biohazards. Birth samples are considered biohazards at certain levels. So you have to make sure that you know you have the right PPE to protect yourself. We don’t have radioactive work here and laser radiation, so those don’t work. But everything else is very significant and we have to plan for all that and have a lab. So if you think in terms of our labs, UBRL is a BSL two kind of facility, which is a biosafety level two. So we have so many things in place, the protocols, the directions, the trainings, the education for our staff to make sure that not only we provide good quality work, we also provide safe work. So bringing to quality. So every lab, what you see are results. So it’s like an iceberg, top of your iceberg. And all you receive is a report that kind of tells you what you got. But in order to generate that report, there are multiple things that happen in the background, and usually they are on the bottom or under the water in the iceberg scenario. So you have to monitor the quality of specimen, you have to have quality controls, you have to have calibrations, you have to have a methodology to troubleshoot errors and look at abnormal results. So you have to have methodologies to do competencies of your, you know, lab members. And proficiency testing is another important aspect that we do. Maintenance of instruments, calibration of instruments, monitoring of temperature. So we have six, seven different refrigerators and -20 freezers that we have to monitor minute by minute just to make sure, you know, nothing happens and our things don’t get compromised, including samples and the testing kits. We have to have strategy for monitoring inventory and make sure, you know, nothing expired and we don’t run out of things. So there are a lot of stuff. So how do we do that? Well, we do a lot of education and training for our employees, and that’s part of, you know, biosecurity training, just like you have farm management plans, we have lab plans, and we do, you know, blood borne pathogen training, things like that, and how to stay safe, how to not cut yourself, how to not get blood on your even clothes, or things like that. We do assay validation. So all these tests that you see have been validated using control samples or quality samples, and make sure that these tests actually do what they say. So when the manufacturer sends a kit out, they have a USDA approved kit, or it could just be a research kit. But in a lab, we have to first identify and make sure that what they claim is actually what is happening. Because we are responsible for results to our clients and we want to make sure whatever we out from the lab is actually reliable and supportive. Part of that is also doing proficiency testing. So you can see we are approved for Yoni’s disease from USDA. And similarly, we are also approved for Coggins test for equine. These have been done to show that we are a standardized lab and we can do all these things. What we, what happens is we do get blinded samples from USDA or APHIs for Unis, and we have to report blinded samples like we report actual samples and they evaluate us on our results and they then justify, okay, okay, you are a reasonable, you know, lab doing right procedures. So, so we have those blinded samples that we have to test for every, every year for all the tests that some of the tests we do, we have accreditation. So USDA did give us accreditation based on that, too. So proficiency is one aspect of that. We have quality assurance and quality control. So all the mechanisms that we have in place during testing to make sure that we are reliable lab. We are a quality lab. We have to calibrate and monitor all our instruments, including refrigerators and any other instrument that we use. We believe in continuous quality improvement. So every time we sit down we have a meeting, we talk about how can we improve this process better, how can we make it better for our clients. And we have had so much client feedback and we are so grateful because that has helped us be here today in the last eight, nine years of development. We do attend conferences and events. We do outreach. So we annually go to UC Davis for the good day. We sponsor the event as well, but we attend the event as well just to learn new things. What is happening? Where are we improving? What is happening in the testing world? What is happening in the infection world? How are things moving, progressing? And of course the most important part is customer feedback. We love our customers feedback because that’s the only way to improve. And we have been grateful to have customers who have given us inputs and helped us achieve better results in all, I mean, biosecurity and the health of our animals in our hands, in our, I mean producers, veterinarians and the laboratory personnel. And if we work together, we can really eradicate these diseases from United States and have a healthy herd and public health. This is some of the community events we do. We provide gift certificates and vouchers for good shows. We sponsor, as I said, goat day. Every year we go there and we are also member of ADGA, but if there are other organizations, we can also look into membership there. This is kind of where we are in terms of our clients. So we have clients all over us, including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and we have clients in Canada. This is kind of a heat map. So you can see we have clients all over us and we are almost reaching 6000 clients now in the United States and Canada. So we are really happy with that and we really feel blessed to have clients and we would like to have more clients and provide more services to more people so that we can eradicate these diseases and become a productive livestock country. So this is our last slide. You already know Omar, we have. [00:39:16] Speaker D: And then some of you guys have used this before. Jonathan was working here for a good amount of years, but he since then moved on. But this is our team and thank. [00:39:28] Speaker C: You for giving us a chance to talk to you and show you some stuff. And hopefully it was informational. And as I said, if you need more information, you can always reach us and we are here to provide whatever we can. Thank you. [00:39:48] Speaker B: Okay, so if you guys have any questions, if you want to type them in the chat, I can relay them so that we just keep it kind of fluid. I do have a question about the Q fever. I have my females tested, but I don’t, I haven’t, I don’t think I’ve tested my males. Should the males be tested also? [00:40:11] Speaker C: Yes, all animals should be tested because it’s a bacterium, it’s not going to identify whether somebody is a male or a female. The only thing that you would have to think about is how it spreads. So females are more important because let’s say you have a female that has an active infection and then she is ready to kid. That’s where you could have a serious problem in the sense that your birthing fluids, your placenta, are rich in this virus. So what happens is at the time of birthing, you may, if there is an active infection, you may have like a nuclear explosion where this will aerosolize and get into the environment. It can spread up to 2 miles, even like the bacterium. And so this can create exposure to the human beings that are handling animals, but also to surrounding areas or, you know, other animals in the farm. So that’s why we focus a lot on females, because we want to make sure there’s no active infection going on, especially during or close to kidding or, you know, in animals. But of course, they should always be negative. But any animal can get infected, right? It’s a bacterium, it’s not going to look at an animal and say, hey, this is not that important. [00:41:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And then how often should we test for Q fever? Should we do that annually? Every year. Because some farms do like biosecurity and they do it for like three years, and then they skip a year and start doing it every other year once they’ve established, like, if they have a closed herd, they’re not bringing any new animals in. So they’ll do two or three years of testing and then skip a year. [00:41:53] Speaker C: So I think. I think it all depends on what a producer wants. I never tell them, like, how, what to do. But generally speaking, if you go by common sense, of course, if you are a new operation and you don’t know the animals, these are new newly bought animals or newly started operation. I would say test at the time of purchase, but know the history of people you’re buying from, because some things can stay latent and you may still get a negative result, but doesn’t mean that the animal did not get exposed. So having that understanding with the, you know, between the buyer and the seller, knowing where you’re getting your stock from is very important. But then testing your animal, once you receive them, quarantine them, test them. If you get a negative, I think it’s a better place to start. But if you. If these are totally new animals and if you are totally new to testing, I would say in the first year, test at time zero, maybe in six months, maybe in a year. So you have three data points in one year, and, you know, everything is negative in that period. And then you can choose to go to an annual testing. But let’s say you have been testing for a while, and you have annual testing done for a few years, and you have a closed hood. I mean, closed herd technically sounds easy, but maintaining biosecurity is very hard in terms of the breaches can happen because of the fomites, if nothing else. Maybe you didn’t bring any new animals, but maybe people came, visitors, they carried something, or you used an instrument that came from somewhere else and it had something. And things have happened. Like, I talk to people and a lot of time they say, oh, but nothing has happened in this and that. And, you know, but then they realize, oh, but this happened. Oh, I went to my friend’s farm and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So there are ways that infection is not only spread by the animals itself, but it can come through various nonliving things that we don’t think about, including our shoes, including our clothing. [00:43:56] Speaker B: So which is. Which are fomites. Which are fomites? Yeah. So I don’t know if that was mentioned, but a fomite is anything that is a non. It can be a non living surface, that bacteria has a time that they can live on it, and you can spread it to others. A doorknob is a fomite. So, yeah, I teach high school. I’m always trying to get kids to clean up where they touch things because I’m like, it’s a fomite. Anything you have on you, you’ve now put on the table. So back to the testing. I’m sorry, I digress. How often can there be false positives? I mean, what is that ratio? How does that happen, like, for people getting false positives? [00:44:49] Speaker C: Okay, so multiple things. This is like a Pandora box, because I talk about this a lot. So it depends on so many factors. So every test is different, if you think about it. Every animal is different, every collection is different, every tester is different, every kit is different, every batch is different. So there are lots of variables in this game. And so I’ll give you my example. So if you are doing Cae, you have different risk factors to get a false positive versus if you’re doing CL versus doing unis versus you’re doing Q fever. So there is no standardized way of answering this question in terms of, you know, why do you get false positive? You can get. So CL is notoriously more famous for getting false positive. CAE used to be, but it has gone better in the last five years because we do all these internal testing and we work with the actual manufacturer and tell to give them feedback. Also when we do testing is, hey, we are getting some flags and this and that. So that’s what, how we work with VMRD, which makes the CAE kit that’s licensed in us. And so I think four or five years ago they fixed their issue. So we gave them a lot of feedback and then, but I think once they fix that, it is a very reliable kit. So I would say there are fewer chances to get a false positive on CAE test nowadays. But if your animal is young, under six months of age, you can get a false positive to influence on maternal antibodies in the animal. Right. Because when they are born they have passive immunity. They are only getting immunity from the moms and the class from they are getting. Right. So there is a overload of circulating antibodies. And if you trust a young animal, there is a chance you’ll get. Doesn’t mean that you will definitely get, but there’s a chance some animals may test false positive. We have not, we don’t have data to show that, but we have heard and we have read that. Let’s say if you do CDT vaccination and you take a sample very close to vaccination, technically that can give you a false flag. And the logic does make sense because then you are priming the immune system to create antibodies against. Right. As whatever you’re injecting. So. And then that can interfere in the assay. We don’t have data to show that, you know, whether. So we typically say if you are doing cdt weight three weeks before you test, rather than just collect a sample right away or test before you give CDD. [00:47:26] Speaker B: So that, that actually happened to me. That actually happened to me. Yeah. So we do have another question. We have, Amber wants to know if she can send in goats, cattle and equine all at the same time. Can she put them all on one test form or is it two different? [00:47:44] Speaker D: So cattle, goat and sheep are on one test form, and we have a separate submission form for equine. They’re all on the website, but they can be sent in the same box and there’s no issues with that. We actually recommend if you have neighbors or if you have other friends that are going to send around the same time as you, you can send in the same box. You can still have your own separate submission form or separate group. And we send reports separately and everything. And it’ll save you some money on shipping as well. And we have several clients that like to do that. [00:48:15] Speaker B: Did it. I’ve done that before also. [00:48:18] Speaker C: And that helps. That helps with one more thing, which is basically set a fee. So what happens is if you are five people sending samples in the same box, of course, writing, filling your own forms, because the report will be of the form. So whatever form you fill, you’ll get a report corresponding to that form. So if you have the same box but you have five different forms in there, and of course you package your sample separately and collectively you have more than five samples. For disease testing, the setup fee gets waived for everybody. So if somebody had ten samples, but somebody had only one sample, not only they save on shipping, they also save one set of fee, because now it’s for the whole order and whole order is the whole box. [00:48:56] Speaker D: And also the reverse of that, if you, if you have, collectively you have less than five samples and we’ll split the set of fee amongst however many submission forms there was. So if there was three submission forms three ways. [00:49:11] Speaker B: That’s awesome. Carrie wants to. I’m sorry. [00:49:17] Speaker C: No, no. And I said it saves you shipping as well. [00:49:19] Speaker B: You know, sometimes, yeah, we all want to save money. Carrie asked, are there published sensitivity and specific specificity ranges for these tests? [00:49:33] Speaker C: For some, yes, actually. For most clothes, no, because it’s a research use test. It actually is not even manufactured in United States. We had to import this kit, so it becomes very expensive to get seal thing done. But what we have is experience. And what we can tell you is it’s a highly sensitive test. But I don’t have numbers too, because we need to do a study. And one of the problems we’re doing a study is your positives need to be clinically validated. And we don’t have the animals in the lab. Right. We are not running an animal facility. So for us to do a high quality study is harder for CAE, yes. It’s highly sensitive, highly specific. So we feel pretty good about it. Anytime you get results in CAE and your results are about 60% inhibition. We have not seen animals come back from that number. So at 60% or more, in most cases, like, I would say 99.99% of cases, it’s positive. If it’s a lower positive, we also. That’s why we also call and talk and make sure that people understand that with Yonis, there is some sensitivity and specificity data for the kit we use. It was primarily developed on cattle samples. So it may not be super accurate for goats and sheep, but doesn’t mean that test is super like, test is not accurate. One of the challenges with unis is the pathogen itself. It’s a very sneaky organism. And so even if you. And there are actually four different kits that do exist that you can use, we use the one from iDexx. IDExx is a very reliable company. It’s a world leader in livestock agnostics. And we have used multiple kits from idexx, and we believe that, you know, they’re very, very reliable. The other one is VMRD. They’re also reliable. We have nothing against that, too. So we use idexx kit for yonis. We use VMRd kit for CAe, for cl. As I said, it’s not even manufactured in us. We had to import it, but we don’t have sensitive data. But it’s a highly sensitive test. It’s a less specific test. And I didn’t talk about Cl. Well, you’re talking about false positives, so let’s go back to that. So in Cl, in case of Cl, you can have more false positives. And that’s from our experience. And there are multiple reasons for that. Chronic stress, compromised immune system. If your animal has some kind of cancers, especially sarcomas, epileptic animals have shown false positive fall flags if your animal has, as I said, immunocompromised or immune system in fighting infections. So if the animal had bronchitis and pneumonia recently, in the last two months or one month, you might get a false flag on Cl tends to have more false flags compared to Cae’s values, associates its own challenges. I think it’s more about the pathogen itself. Creating a great test has not been super easy for yonis because of its sneaky behavior. And some of these, one of the challenges that you can see with yonis and Cl especially, is that the infections, even after exposure, can stay latent for a while. So they won’t turn clinical right away, or they won’t start. Even in blood tests, they may not start showing pseudo positivity right away. So while, as with CA it can be faster. [00:53:28] Speaker B: So with a yonis test, if it comes back positive, I had a farm contact me and asked me. They had two goats come back positive for Yonis. And I told them, reach out to a university that does the fecal testing, because that’s how you would find out, like, definitively if your goat has yonis, because sometimes you can get false positives. Was I correct in telling her to have a fecal done? [00:53:55] Speaker C: Yes. So with yonis. So serology is what we test in blood. So if you do serology testing, if your results are super strong. So this is what we are talking about, is our lab only. We are not talking about generalized things. Right? So different labs work differently. They have different levels of doing work accurately. We have a lot of things in place that we take pride in. And we accurate? We are pretty accurate in terms of what we do. So all labs are different. So we don’t want to generalize. But generally speaking, with yonis, if you have a strong positive, so the values are above one in the test, we do. We feel that that’s more or less a given. Um, you can always confirm with the fecal. It doesn’t hurt. A fecal is a PCR test, so it’s looking for antigen, while as our test is looking for antibodies. So our test is a little more indirect. That test is a little more direct looking for active pathogen. Right. So it complements it well. So, yeah, there’s no harm in doing a second opinion or a different kind of test to, you know, confirm your diagnosis. [00:55:06] Speaker B: Okay. Kerry wants to know if there’s a minimum age at which you should start testing or does it depend on the test? It’s about like, minimum is eight months, right. [00:55:17] Speaker C: We typically say six months and above. And so again, some common sense is needed in the sense that, see, where are you getting your animal from? If it was born on your property, you have been negative. You are biosecured, you are a closed herd. If it’s a young animal and we know mom is negative and the other herd mates are negative, you can wait eight months. You can wait nine months because you know your animal. If you are buying animal from somebody, do you know that person well? Are you buying it from a sailboat? Are you buying it from a proper breeder with authentic, you know, credentials? So all those things go into play. But if you don’t know the animal, or if you are not, if you’re not sure about the reliability, I would say get that animal test. Like quarantine them test. At the most, you’ll get a false flag if it’s a very young animal. Right. Let’s say four months, five months old. Or if you can have a deal with the seller, ask them, hey, can we test the mom or can we test the herd mates? Because then that’s the best closest. So that’s why a lot of people tend to do this and I don’t advise, but I see the financial aspect of it. So I am okay with it is that they either selectively test a few animals or very few animals, not a substantial portion of animals. So, you know, and then you can say, you can’t test five animals and say hundred are negative. So you have to have a substantial pool of animals that you test regularly or periodically or, you know, even if you are sampling, I don’t expect you to test all the animals, but at least test your adult animals in a systematic way where you can actually, while saving money, still be biosecured. Don’t just test one animal. [00:57:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I split my herd in half and do half in the fall and half in the spring is generally what I do. [00:57:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I understand that aspect. I mean, money’s get tight or, you know, you have to have cash flows and all that. So I totally understand that. But have a system with that to go with that. Like, you know, so that in the end your whole is kind of tested instead of, you know, assuming that, oh, based on these five animals, we are all good. We don’t have to do anything else ever. So there are some people with that mentality. So understanding that it’s not a one time thing and done. It’s something you have to be vigilant about, you have to be thinking about. And not just testing, but the whole biosecurity part of it. Like to keep everything safe, including yourself. [00:57:57] Speaker B: Yes. Well, if no one else has any more questions, I’m going to turn it over to our president Kerry so she can wrap it up. And I really want to thank you both for doing this. I love your lab. Send many people to go to Ubrl. Go to UBRL. I love your customer service. And I know that if I don’t let Omar know that I got my results, he’ll be calling me on Saturday. [00:58:27] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:58:28] Speaker D: And he’s the one calling on the weekends. Cause we confused every single one of our clients. If you talk to me during the weekday, that’s me. And he’s on the weekend. [00:58:38] Speaker B: Okay, thank you, Michelle. [00:58:41] Speaker A: We did have another comment from Wendy. She said, thank you so much. I will say your rapid turnaround and kindly responses to emails are top notch. So another shout out. [00:58:50] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:58:52] Speaker A: So wow. I mean, what a great presentation guys. Really enjoyed this. Thank you to all of our Texas mini milker members that joined. This will be rebroadcast on the mini dairy goat podcast, and I’ll try to actually also post it to the YouTube channel as well since we did record the audio and the video. So with that, I’m going to stop recording.
