Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Blood Transfusion Basics with Ryan Breuer
Join us for a discussion about a study that looks at using bovine blood as an alternative to caprine blood when goats need a blood transfusion.
In this episode we discuss a 2021 paper looking at xenotransfusion between bovines and caprines. This paper is titled Preliminary Investigation of Bovine Whole Blood Xenotransfusion as a Therapeutic Modality fo the Treatment of Anemia in Goats and can be found at
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7969644/
Questions can be sent to Dr. Breuer at rmbreuer@wisc.edu
If your company or organization would like to sponsor an episode or if you have questions about today's show, email Office@AASRP.org
Hello, welcome to our next episode of Baas and Bleats, the AASRP podcast. Today we are talking with Dr. Ryan Breyer, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hello. It is so good to chat with you today.
Ryan:Great to be here, Sarah. Thanks for inviting me. Pleasure to be here on today's show.
Sarah:So Ryan and I actually went to vet school together. We were one year apart, right? We were in the Food Animal Club together. So it's very exciting for me to have a fellow badger on the show today. So let's just start with a little bit of history, a little bit of how you got to be, where you are today, where you went to school, all that good stuff.
Ryan:Yeah, like Sarah said, I am an alumnus from uh UW and I I have ventured back to my old stomping grounds, but I have I have an appointment here both at the Vet School as well as the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Lab, or WVDL, as a client case and outreach coordinator. And what that means is basically I work with veterinarians who send in samples for animals that may be having health issues or need something diagnosed. And if that kind of troubles them or kind of stumps them, then I help with investigating or providing some information to help them investigate those disease incidences a little bit further. So, like I said, I'm I work at the WVDL, but I also work at the Vet School. I'm a clinical assistant professor in large animal internal medicine, and that's kind of my role here at the UW. But going as far back as my background, I'm from a diversified rural farm, back rural farming community and background in southeastern Wisconsin with an upbringing in agriculture and large animals. I completed my vet school at UW in 2012, and then I practiced in large animal practice, general practice for about two and a half years, and then found that I wasn't being challenged enough and I wanted to venture on to other venues. And then I went to Northwest Iowa, where I was a dairy field extension specialist with ISU Extension and Outreach, and was there for a year or so, and then was offered the opportunity to do a large animal or food animal residency at Iowa State, which I did. I did that training program for about three years. It was a three-year program. And then after that, I was accepted back to my position currently here at UW. So at UW, I have a special focus in consulting with veterinarians as well as teaching veterinary students. And areas of my interest include animal internal or large animal internal medicine, small ruminant medicine, concepts of AVMA approved humane euthanasia for our large animal species, as well as herd health investigations and diagnostic and infectious disease consultations. So long list there, but I enjoy doing all of the things here that UW allows me to do with all the different hats I wear.
Sarah:And Ryan is also super helpful with AASRP. We sat on we sit on a number of committees together. He helps with the student stuff. Basically, my takeaway from all that you just said is if you have a case and you don't know what's going on, you're the person to call.
Ryan:You better believe it. Yes.
Sarah:All right. So AASRP members, Ryan's out there for you. Give him a call at the Diagnostic Lab in Wisconsin. Even though I live in New York and I I do consult Cornell, I tend to call Wisconsin still on a regular basis. I still feel like it's my comfort zone to call back to Wisconsin if I have questions.
Ryan:No problem, no problem. And we have no bias. So if we don't have the answers, we certainly send those diagnostic cases or testing that we don't have here. We refer that to other diagnostic cases to different diagnostic labs. And Cornell is on our list too.
Sarah:So Yeah, yeah, they do. Today we are talking to Dr. Breyer about his 2021 paper entitled Preliminary Investigation of Bovine Whole Blood Xenotransfusion as a therapeutic modality for the treatment of anemic goats. As we all know, barber pole worms or harmoncus are such a huge problem across the country.
Ryan:This is a nationwide issue, and then we can even say that it's a worldwide issue too, especially with hemuncous contortus resistance. So yes, it is found in all parts of the country as well as the world.
Sarah:All right. So along with all the other causes that animals get anemia, right? Like they might have a bad kidding, you know, lots of disease processes, but really we we watch the anemia with the worm and the resistance. I'm lucky that, and probably you too, Ryan, we live north where we don't have quite as much resistance. I won't not not zero for sure, but uh less. We're not the south. So it's not as big an issue up here, but I see anemic goats every day. I saw two today.
Ryan:We'll even see anemic animals from copper toxicity as well. So they go into that hemolytic crisis too. So there's a lot of diseases that cause these animals to go anemic. So that's why we had this paper and focused on ways that can help us deal with anemia in small ruminants. So it was kind of our focus to look at how we might address anemia in small ruminants, specifically goats on this on this paper, and when we did not have the ability to have a donor animal for that transfusion. As you may or may not know, in the large animal realm, there's not a lot of, and a lot of times there are no commercially available blood transfusion products out there. So we have to rely on blood donors, whether that is from a herd member within your herder flock or from a hospital setting. At the University of Wisconsin, we do have some blood donor cows and blood donor horses. Unfortunately, we don't have any blood donor camelids or blood donor small ruminants. So in those circumstances, we ask for producers or small ruminant owners to bring in a buddy to provide a transfusion. Sometimes they may not have a buddy that can be a donor to the animal that needs a transfusion. Sometimes anemia is a herd-wide issue as well. So taking blood from an animal that appears non-anemic may not be a non-anemic animal. Also, when we're taking blood from animals, we're looking for animals that are typically larger in size than the animals that need a transfusion, and then also animals that don't have a very high demand for the normal blood volume. So that is animals that might be in gestation or are in peak lactation. And this is a lot of times difficult, especially coming from the dairy state, that we have goats from goat dairies or ewes from sheep dairies that are in lactation. So that kind of reduces the pool of blood donors. So that kind of spurred us to thinking, well, can we run a pilot study that looks at this xenotransfusion? So xenotransfusion might be a new concept or a new term to many people, and I just want to kind of explain that. It basically means xenotransfusion, but it's a process of transferring blood from one species to a different species. So in this study, we are transferring blood from our cattle, our donor, to goats, and then seeing how those animals respond to this mixing of different species blood, which is not uncommon in the realm of veterinarian. So we knew that this was a possibility because it has worked in other small animal species, particularly dog transfusion, blood transfusions to cats. And it works well because dogs are typically larger in size and can donate blood to our smaller cats. Now, with that being said, this is not typically done on a regular basis. It's usually done in a more emergent or emergency type of basis, where either the blood stores in small animal, small animal, dog and cat hospitals, they're deficient in maybe a supply, or there's agglutination issues, or they they have an instance where the blood cells coagulate or agglutinate to one another and clot and do not help that animal in that transfusion issue. So that's kind of where where we came from with this idea of let's see if we can use an animal with a larger blood blood volume, cattle, and use that in in a species that potentially doesn't have a good donor.
Sarah:Right. So this study was basically two parts. So one was two goats that actually got the transfusion, and then there was another section that was lab work.
Ryan:Yeah, so there was a there was a live animal part portion of this study, and then there was uh the lab portion. Uh the live animal, we only we had a very small kind of shoestring budget. So we just did a very pilot kind of study on two animals that we provided a blood transfusion. Now these animals had lower PCVs, not low that I would say are in the severe category of anemia, and that's where I would say when animals need a blood transfusion. Typically I'm looking at peck cell volumes of 10 to 12. Now, goats do great jobs of not showing their need for a blood transfusion. They can be at a PCV of 10 or 12 percent for a pretty extended period of time because their disease process, typically intestinal parasites, is a more of a chronic issue than an acute issue. When that 10 or 12 percent PCV becomes more of an emergent type of issue is when we have acute blood loss or hemorrhage, that kind of thing, or hemolytic crisis because of a copper toxicity. That that's when it's more emergent, and this would kind of help those animals if a donor wouldn't be available. So the live animal proof of concept is can we do this? Will these animals respond positively or negative negatively to a xenotransfusion from a cow? In this case, it was a nine-year-old Angus cow. She was healthy, um, no history of drug administration, and was non non-lactating and um not pregnant. So a great animal to take also blood from as well. And the laboratory phase was then to do our major and minor cross cross shoot cross-matching to see the compatibility of bovine and caprine or goat, cow and goat blood combinations. So we looked at how they how red blood cells reacted to being put in serum or plasma and from a different species, and then vice versa. So do the major and uh minor cross matching. And we found some promising information out of those animals, and I believe we had 15 cross matches between the recipient and the donor. The recipient was the the small ruminant or goat in this case, and the donor was a uh cattle species. So we didn't we did not, what's the term I'm looking for? They were both beef and dairy species that we used for our cattle. Same same with our goats.
Sarah:Oh, right. So they were both, yeah.
Ryan:Yes, so boar, boar goats and tagenbergs were there and alpines.
Sarah:So back to the the two goats that got the cow blood. So those of you have ever done uh you know, cow to cow or dog to dog or any sort of blood transfusion, the protocol is very similar. You know, you give it really slow, and then you as you see they're not reacting, you go a little quicker. It was very your very typical kind of protocol. The goats did get some banamine ahead of time, which a lot of us will give anti-inflammatories. I'm never sure if I should give benadryl or banamine or what dose. So you guys chose banamine at kind of a lower than normal dose. What what what was the decision making there?
Ryan:Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question. It's a good question, Sarah. We give an anti-inflammatory or antihistamine because these animals can potentially have an anaphylactic reaction with blood products, especially when they're coming from other animals. So when I say blood products, it's not only blood transfusions, but plasma transfusions as well. Um, and an antihistamine does exactly that. It's it restricts uh histamine response. So unfortunately, I mean we see um antihistamines being provided, such as diphenhydramine or um what we call in the store benadryl uh to small animals, so dogs and cats. But unfortunately, uh we can't really use that as a comparison to our small ruminants or large animals, first of all, because um it's given injectably uh in those animals, and there might be some cost prohibitive prohibitive restraints that we may have giving an antihistamine IV to our large animals. Again, there is also the worry of hypotension, and I was doing a little bit more reading prior to this podcast as well when looking at the pharmacokinetics of diphenhydramine in other species. And there was a paper which we do reference here in our paper to camelids and horses and the use of diphenhydramine, and they they can cause some issues. And what we've what they found in that particular study was the diphenhydramine stayed around a lot longer, so the distribution was different as well in camelids. So there's there are species difference differences, and hypotension can certainly be a risk. I think it's quite low that that thought process comes from humans. So another kind of interesting study that I uh quick looked up to in humans is that it can cause at toxic doses, cause hypotension, but also hallucinations and some other really bad effects. So it's consider hypnotic effects too. So there is a there is a study out there that look at pigs with diphenhydramine toxicity as a controlled kind of pilot study as well. But the reason we we don't use benadryl or diphenhydramine is because there are some more contraindications there. And we know that flumix and megalamine or banamine is is used as an antipyretic or reduces fever, and that's one of the first things that we may see in an anaphylactic reaction is fever to an anaphylactic reaction after a transfusion. So and and that can really be detrimental to an animal too. So we're trying to suppress that and just be proactive and giving that at a lower dose. They don't have to have the higher dose, especially when we're thinking about an animal that might be feeling not very well, being anemic, these animals probably aren't eating uh and consuming water as readily. And we know that a side effect of banamine is renal uh damage as well as abomasal ulcers. So if we know that the the kidneys are taxed because there's some dehydration there already, we don't want to give a very large dose of banamine or flunixin to cause further issues. And we will monitor kidney values before and after a blood transfusion because there can also be some azotemia or issues with giving or providing a blood transfusion because when we provide blood transfusions, it's basically a band-aid to allow the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, and that that blood transfusion sometimes can only last about four days at minimum, but as long as seven to ten days. And the more often you give blood transfusions, the likelihood of that transfusion lasting longer is pretty reduced. It typically is along that line of five or less days with more concurrent uh transfusions.
Sarah:Also, it seems with the Benadryl and the Flu Nixon, you guys are looking to see what happens, right? You're looking to see how the animals respond. So if you do a bunch of stuff to mask it, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna. I mean, obviously you don't want to cause harm to these animals, but you do want to see like what does this blood do? How does the animal respond to this?
Ryan:Exactly. And even without xenotransfusions, when we're giving transfusions from one goat to another or one sheep to another, even one calf to another, even plasma, it doesn't have to be blood transfusions, we're monitoring these animals incrementally. So every five, 10, 15 minutes, 30, that concurrently to make sure that if we're seeing any adverse reactions, such as increased heart rate, increased respiratory rate, increased temperature, if we have urticaria, which is hives, or hair standing on end, those are all reactions that the animal is potentially having an anaphylactic reaction so that we can stop the transfusion and provide some more anaphylactic medications so that these animals don't go into a crisis.
Sarah:Yeah, and that's not just in the vet hospital. Those of us who do it in the field, I mean, primarily the blood products that I give is plasma to Krias. And yeah, it's scary. Even when you're giving something like plasma from another camelid and you know it's like this or die. I swear I just keep my stethoscope on their heart the whole time. Like I'm just I'm so paranoid, and you have all your little syringes lined up. So yes, yes, it's not just something they do at the vet hospital. We all do that whenever we do this.
Ryan:Yeah, it's really it's really important to keep keep those parameters in mind and see if there's a trending up or trending down because that will help you get ahead of what could potentially uh be a dangerous situation for those animals that are potentially already critical uh when you're when you're providing this uh therapy.
Sarah:Yeah, because at least in the field, a lot of times these are last ditch efforts. I just wanted to step back. Ryan had said uh one of the things that this can cause is azotemia, and I just wanted to define that quickly. It's just a term we use for basically when there's a buildup of nitrogen in the blood. So if the BUN and creatinine are the the kidney um values that we monitor through the blood, and so if the B UN is elevated, we know that the kidneys are not filtering out the nitrogen like they're supposed to. And that that's a symptom, it's not a disease, so it can be caused by many things. Is that a good definition, Ryan?
Ryan:Yes, and and I will say that in so in both of our animals here, so we did see a little bit of reaction. Unfortunately, we did not have the the laboratory phase completed before the live animal phase. So we did not have the compatibilities of the bovine transfusion or bovine donor to the recipients before we did the trial here on the two animals. And there was a little bit of reaction. They did fine. They we stopped the transfusion on one, and the other one we completed, and we did look at blood values, and there was some mild elevation. For the creatinine on the one, and then there was a little bit more, I would say, above mild, but not so much that we would call it severe. So probably about moderate azotemia and BUN and creatinine on the other dough. But after some IV fluid therapy, we had no issues.
Sarah:Okay, so when you were giving the blood, you did see reactions in the animals. Can you talk to us about that?
Ryan:Yeah, so we we did see some mild issues come up on these girls. Sometimes we do see that, see this, but not as significant from a standpoint of we start seeing elevated heart rates and elevated respiratory rates and elevated temperatures. So for the first dough, we we were able to administer about 300 mils of bovine whole blood. And we did start seeing a little bit of hyperemia around the vulva, some urticaria. So again, that's kind of your like rash of the ears, and then some piloerection of the hairs over the animal. And then they developed some loose stool. And this transfusion lasted 105 minutes, but we saw resolution of these signs after that transfusion about 20 minutes. So this animal did not have significant anaphylaxis, but she did have some reaction. The the second dough, she only received a little bit more, 319 mils of whole blood. And at about 75 minutes into the transfusion, we did know some agit agitated, she was restless, and she would kind of get up and lay down, and then we said, okay, stop. We have to we have to stop this transfusion. She also had developed some pyroection of the hair and then swelling along the muzzle, which did go away, but some of that swelling around the muzzle did last into the into the next day. But after 24 hours, she was back to normal. We did do some blood work on them and noticed that they did have one had slight azotemia, one had a little bit more azotemia than the other, which was seen as an increase in the creatinine. But then this had resolved again within the 24 hours after some fluid therapy, and these animals went back to normal behavior within 30 minutes of the transfusion. So we were quite impressed in how well it how well they responded. Now, I will say that that second dose, just because of her behavior, we did provide a little bit of for support and she developed that normal behavior after 30 minutes. So just wanted to clarify that that we did not let her suffer or anything. We were under Aya Cook protocols, so we have certain things to follow to make sure that no harm is done, and we make sure that the patient's well-being is is first and foremost held up.
Sarah:So even though even though there was reactions, we still consider this a successful transfusion, right? I mean, I I feel like I've never given a blood transfusion where there was zero reaction. You know, there's always some mild kind of reaction. Pilo erection is basically furred animal goosebumps, is how I explain it. Yes.
Ryan:When their hair stands on end. Perfect. Yeah.
Sarah:Right. And so so even though those reactions occurred, we still would consider this a successful.
Ryan:Yeah, and like I said, with the information we knew after with the laboratory phases and doing major cross matches and a minor cross mass matches, we did not have that set up until after the live animal proof of concept. So we had that information later because not always do we have the capability of doing major and minor cross matches, especially in the field.
Sarah:Right.
Ryan:Correct, correct. And a lot of times because of the different type of the different blood types, and I do have a great like supplementary paper that is great for those who have not done blood transfusions. It's in the vet clinics of America. There's a great chapter on the use of blood and blood products in ruminants. And they go through how much you should take, how you should prepare the animals for blood transfusion. And then they also mention that there's not, we don't have those capabilities to do my major and minor cross matches. But they also talk about uh cattle who have 11 genetic systems of blood groups, and sheep have eight blood group systems, and goats have six blood group systems, and camelids have not so much studied about them, but they do have identified six blood group systems, but there certainly could be more. What's interesting to know is that there's factors or glycolipid antigens that cause reactions. And what for what we know in goat blood is that they don't have these factors, as of what I know from these studies, which make them great recipients for decreased reactions to blood transfusions. So we will say that we wish we had maybe some better and uh like compatibility and wish we had to had the ability to do the cross matching before we had the live animals, but we use this as more of a in-the-field type of approach that not all the time will there be cross matching available, and a lot of times small ruminants will accept blood transfusions without that cross matching and have no issues.
Sarah:Right, right. All right.
Ryan:For the cross matching, it was a group of animals that donated blood as far as donor, donor blood and recipient blood, and then they went through a couple different processes. I won't go into that. Uh I'll let you read on about how we cross match there. But then we looked at their compatibility, and there were there were some criteria uh that looked at macroscopic agglutination, and then we had a scoring system. So a score of four plus was incompatible reaction that had one or two major solid clumps with clear plasma, down to three, two, and one incompatible reaction, which was numerous small clumps and barely visible macroscroscopic agglutinations. And then we had an incompatible, so there's one plus and then incompatible, which was red blood cells aggregates observed on the microscope evaluation. Now we know in small ruminants and cattle we don't have a lot of that agglutination like horses and dogs and cats do, where their blood red blood cells kind of stick together a little bit easier. But in our ruminant species, we don't typically see that. So when we do see that, we know that there may be some incompatibility. And then we also looked at compatibles. So when there was no macroscopic or microscopic agglutination detected when we processed these samples. And we talk about how we wash the red blood cells and we took the serum from one species and the red blood cells from the different species and mixed them together to see how the red blood cells responded. And all in all, we only we only had four incompatible reactors or cross matches on a macroscopic agglutination scoring system, and then all of our minor cross matches were compatible. So this makes us more intrigued to see, hey, can we use bovine blood with the our small ant small ruminant species, particularly goats in this study for this blood transfusion process? So and if we can have the ability to do cross matching, this would make us more comfortable to say, all right, these this is a good match from a cow to to a goat, and we we have less fear of it causing some anaphylactic reaction.
Sarah:Yeah. And can any lab do that, or is that like a s a specific thing that only certain labs would be able to do?
Ryan:A lot of times now in an emergency situation, which typically this would be, we wouldn't we wouldn't probably have the opportunity to. And a lot of times we're doing this at 10 o'clock at night or after because they are hemolytic crises. But when we do have that, that our lab here at the W, sorry, at the not at the WVDL, but at the vet school, they can have the ability and the staffing to do cross-matching. And it takes the special reagents that they rinse and wash the red blood cells. It's a saline solution-based solution, and they have to centrifuge them down and create uh a red blood cell pellet, and then have the people that have the education to evaluate whether there's agglutination occurring or not to do this. So it's more or less done in a lab setting uh to see if there's that reaction or not. There's not um a particular test, not that I know of. It's currently certainly could be out there for other species, but I don't know if that's out there available for small ruminants at this time.
Sarah:I did try to Google to see if you could buy goat blood or cow blood online.
Ryan:Yeah.
Sarah:Have you done this before? You haven't buy bovine blood, but it's for research. So it comes in these tiny little like 120 mil vials. I don't know what people do research for them, but uh and it and for like this little thing was like over a hundred dollars.
Ryan:Yeah, it's it's quite expensive, and blood transfusions are are expensive. It's a life-saving treatment or therapy, so it's going to be a little bit more expensive. And and the reason why it's expensive is because either you have to have a donor and you you take blood from that donor right there and right then, or if you do have the opportunity, like we do here at the at UW, we do have cow blood donors and horseblood donors. We can draw blood from them and then store it, but similar to small animals, cats and dogs, there's only a certain length of time for a shelf life of blood. And in blood transfusions or blood transfusions that we store blood from cows, we go back to our small animal uh colleagues, and typically, depending on the bag that they're collected into and the reagent that uh allows for those red blood cells not to die off because they do need glucose uh and energy, basically ATP, to survive on the shelf, it typically has anywhere from a 21-day to a 42-day um shelf life for those blood products.
Sarah:Oh wow, that's really short.
Ryan:Correct, correct.
Sarah:I mean, plasma we can freeze, and that has a much longer shelf life, but and we can and we can freeze or keep at very low temperatures.
Ryan:Um we don't want to refrigerate that blood because um there's always a chance for um bacterial contamination. Uh so we want to freeze that, and we do freeze that, and we have to thaw it out very slowly because again, there can be some denaturation of uh of proteins uh on the thawing process end. One other thing that we should be cognizant about when providing blood transfusions, even from the same species, is disease status. Now, this is the diagnostician coming out in me because that's all I do every day is uh look for disease or look for infectious disease. And providing blood product or blood transfusions is by no means no risk. Uh so what that means is there certainly can be animals that are not clinically ill, they're clinically healthy, but can can be carrying infectious diseases. So in the in our study, we did look at, or we do know of, bovine animals or cows providing blood transfusions, and they are able to trans transfer bovine leucosis virus in that blood transfusion. Now, we should keep that in mind because ionis can be transmitted that way. So a lot of times when we're purchasing plasma products from a commercial entity, they screen their animals for these infectious diseases to reduce the chances of cross-contaminating or cross-infecting an animal who's receiving a blood transfusion. This with this being said, we can certainly do our best in looking for those diseases, but they certainly can be there and they're certainly a risk. I know during my residency I remember this as a very good learning opportunity for myself is when we did a blood transfusion from one camelid to another camelid, we found out that the recipient of the blood transfusion also received a hemoparasite known as mycoplasma hemolame. And it was because the animal that was donating that blood also had mycoplasma hemolame. So we had to treat the recipient with oxygenetrocycline, and everything went well. But it's certainly important to screen for infectious diseases that can be carried in the blood from asymptomatic carriers. So that's just one other thing I want to make sure that's well understood is that uh blood transfusions don't go without risk, but it's really important for us to also monitor for those risks and look for infectious diseases in anyone that's going to be a blood donor. And I know at the University of Wisconsin we do do that screening, especially for if you don't have a buddy donor to come along with your goat or sheep. We have a program at the UW where we encourage people to have their animals be donor animals, and then we will cover some of that infectious disease testing costs.
Sarah:Nice. Yeah, that's a great point for sure. Unfortunately, like everything else when you're in the field, it's gonna be last minute, probably. So hopefully, hopefully your vet knows like, oh, I have this herd of cows that I know is really clean and well tested, you know what I mean? So it could be a lot of cows on your own farm or something, or enough goats, or goats that aren't lactating or you're gestating. So, all right, great. So, Dr. Brewer's email will be in the notes of the podcast if anybody has any questions and would like to reach out to him. So, as with all of our podcasts, I have my final wrap-up question that hopefully you've been thinking about. What do you see as the next problem that researchers need to think about and address in small ruminant medicine? It can be in your own field, outside of your field, reach for the stars.
Ryan:Yeah, this is a great question. And unfortunately, I don't have a particular disease that might be up and coming, but coming from a diagnostic lab perspective, I guess I would say I think it's important to send in samples to diagnostic labs for further investigation. We might not have a slam dunk diagnosis on some of those samples, and a lot of times those samples may be a post-mortem or after-death sample. Sometimes we we don't know what caused a disease and why an animal fell ill and died. But over time we collect this data and we sit on mountains of information here at the diagnostic lab. And I wish I could split myself into four so that I could go back retrospectively to look at different species and different disease entities like abortions or respiratory disease or enteric disease, so dealing with the GI tract, and then see if there's any trends, particular age groups or breeds or male versus female kind of issues, and we can gain a lot of information. So I do encourage the listeners to understand that even though if an animal passes away, it is good to send in samples if we don't have a strong feeling of why this animal passed away, because it's important to kind of look at those infectious diseases and to see why this is happening. And is there a possibility to further investigate what causes this or why is there why there is a higher incidence in in one particular animal over the other? So I don't have anything that's up and coming right at the moment, but just kind of keep that in mind that diagnostics are good for learning and investigation, and hopefully it gives us better understanding in the future for the people that come and the animals that come.
Sarah:Right. It's a little bit of help us help you, right? Like if the vet's out in the field and the producers are willing to send in samples and help diseases get diagnosed, you guys can help us better in the future.
Ryan:Yeah. And that's what helps us with creating these ideas. Investigators are we what we call it clinical medicine and more of a scientific-based clinical medicine so that we can utilize those samples to help us create new diagnostics, to create new treatments and therapies or management practices.
Sarah:Great. All right. Well, this was a super interesting study. I love the studies that are so applicable to you know day-to-day life for all of us out in the field. Thank you for doing it. And I'm sure there'll be more on this in the future, I'm guessing.
Ryan:Yes, yes. We'd hope to have that opportunity to do more studies into this kind of topic. And if there are questions, they can certainly reach out to me. Unfortunately, I'm not one of the uh social media aficionados, but I do have an email address that they can send to me any questions. It's rmbrier at W I S C dot edu. And that's just my email at the university here.
Sarah:Perfect. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, Ryan.
