The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: thesuffolksmallholding on February 23, 2019, 09:17:26 pm
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Today I turned over a ewe with a slight limp, and was shocked to find a secondary infection from orf on the teats. She had only been limping a day or so. After turning over a few more ewes I found another with the same and a few with legions developing. Sprayed those with alamycin and gave the ewes with secondary infections an antibiotic injection.
I have only found two lambs with orf on the nose out of around 50.
I looked into the Scabivax vaccine and I'm unsure whether to vaccinate the whole mob. If they've already got orf will the vaccine really be worth doing? I read that it limits spread, and can reduce severity of cases. Is this true?
Fingers crossed the ewes with secondary infection don't get mastitis, not I have caught it and started treating the infection.
Obviously now I know the flock have orf I will vaccinate ewes pre-lambing and lambs at a few days old in future years.
Thank you!
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Once you start vaccinating with scabivax you cant stop, so it’s worth trying other means of controlling the virus before turning to vaccine. Brinnicombe fro but buckets will reduce spread between lambs, as can keeping lambs in age batches rather than mixed ages in the field. Rock salt also will dry up any lesions and rotate turnout fields at lambing each year.
If you do decide to vaccinate, a lot of people just do the ewes, and let the lambs build a natural immunity to it.
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My experience on a farm with endemic orf was the opposite. The ewes could be considered immune, the lambs needed vaccinating each year. And we found that we could get away with only vaccinating the lambs in certain pastures; there were fields in which we never saw orf, even though all the sheep came to the farmstead and went through the same pens.
I suspect therefore that a different strategy may be required in different circumstances.
We slipped up one year, the helper went straight from vaccinating to give the orphan lambs their bottles, wearing the same clothes and I think maybe not having washed her hands. So the pet lambs got orf ::).