Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Parasite Resistance with Dr. Emma Borkowski
This month we sat down with Dr. Emma Borkowski - Assistant Professor of Pathology at Ontario Veterinary College - to discuss her work surrounding parasite management in sheep and goats. Dr. Borkowski discusses a project that was funded by AASRP to help evaluate efficacy of various methods of storing fecal samples before analysis for fecal egg counting. She also shares insights that she has gained through her research on resistance and resilience to parasites along with future directions for her research.
Learn more about Dr. Borokowski's work here: https://ovc.uoguelph.ca/pathobiology/people/faculty/emma-borkowski/
Learn more about the AASRP research grant application process here: https://www.aasrp.org/Main/Main/Research/AASRP-Research-Grant.aspx?hkey=546d2e15-f2cd-4ce8-a837-a16cfd4f3790
To find an AASRP member near you, visit the AASRP "Find A Small Ruminant Veterinarian" page: https://www.aasrp.org/Main/Main/About/Find-A-Small-Ruminant-Veterinarian.aspx?hkey=e59ebdd0-6d57-493b-9ae2-e838323b9a38
If your company or organization would like to sponsor an episode or if you have questions about today's show, please email Office@AASRP.org
Hello, and welcome to the next episode of Baas and Bleats, the podcast sponsored by the American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners. This afternoon, I am talking to Dr. Emma Borkowski. She is assistant professor at the University of Guelph at the Ontario Veterinary College. Welcome. How are you?
Emma:Thanks so much for having me. I'm doing great and keen to chat about what ASRP has done for my research.
Sarah:Yay! So, as always, we're gonna start with a little history. If you want to give us a little background about where you went to school and how you got to where you are and how you've developed an interest in this research line.
Emma:Sure. I guess my educational history is relatively boring as educational histories go. I did my undergrad in biomedical sciences here at the University of Guelph because I desperately wanted to go to vet school. And as an Ontario resident, this was my only choice. We have geographic limitations. And while I was in undergrad, I got to take a really interesting course on parasites, and so that sort of sparked my interest in them. Once I did get into vet school, the more I learned about parasites, the more interested I was. And so as I was going through vet school and nearly froze to death a few times on my external rotations and decided the actual practice was not for me, I was thinking about what I could do after vet school to still kind of help with animal health and use the knowledge that I had, but kind of use my strengths. And I knew I also wasn't the best communicator when it came to clients, so I thought, okay, had a chance to do pathology in vet school, really enjoyed that as well. And I was fortunate enough to get kind of a combined quasi-residency and PhD program. So I was training for pathology certification and doing research on parasites at the same time. So four years later, got my PhD, got my pathology board certification. And then for the first two years after I graduated, I was working in England at the University of Surrey's veterinary school. And then soon after the pandemic ended, a job came up back home in the Guelph area, and they were good enough to bring me back for 2022. And I've been here ever since.
Sarah:Awesome. And you know, for most of us, parasites are just a thorn in our side. So I'm glad there's people like you who love them and want to study them and tell those of us what to do and how best to do it.
Emma:It's more like a fascination with how they're such a thorn in the side and what we can do about that thorn.
Sarah:Yes, and it's a huge, huge issue, as I'm sure you're aware. Um I definitely wanted to point out that it's really interesting. So for it hasn't been super long, maybe four or five years, ASRP has been trying to support research more. When we look at our members and what we can do for them, you know, one of the biggest things we cut up against is that there just isn't science for so many of the things for our sheep and goats out there for medication. And I mean, parasites is a huge problem, a lot of the diseases. So we don't have a big pot, but we are trying to give out money. I think at this point we're doing it every other year. And you were one of our first recipients, so you can explain a little bit more about this, but this is like a side project of something bigger, right?
Emma:Yeah, so when I saw this funding opportunity, you're right. I think I got it in the second cycle because I did try the first time around. I was not successful because they were looking for something that had a bit more scope. And so I had to kind of go back to the drawing board and think a little bit more about how I could make a project that would be good for everybody throughout North America rather than sort of more for our local area, which was a good thought process. But at the time I did have kind of a local study going on where we were really looking at the impact of parasites and immune responses in local goats, and a collaborator was doing similar work in sheep. So we had lots and lots of samples. Our grad students needed help, and so I was thinking about how could I make a little spin-off project using the resources we had that would be great for an undergraduate student researcher to sort of introduce them to the wonderful world of sheep and goat parasites and the sheep and goat industry and research in general. So I really kind of tried to build the project that ended up getting funded based on that and came up with an idea that would work pretty well for anybody who's collecting poop samples from sheep and goats anywhere to do diagnostic tests. And so that was kind of how this project came to be.
Sarah:That's awesome. I love getting undergrads involved and you know, showing them how the scientific process works, and hopefully they'll be future AASRP members. And we we spend a lot of time talking about how we can draw in students, how we can keep those students interested once they graduate, you know, and keep them involved in AASRP.
Emma:So uh we're doing well with this particular student because this student was an undergraduate student, even she wanted to go to vet school, hadn't applied yet, and she is now actually in her second year of vet school and is thinking about going down the food animal track. So point one.
Sarah:That's exactly what we want to hear. Awesome. So yeah, so let's jump into the project. The project is not yet published. You have presented it in 2024 at the AAB research summary presentations. So the information is out there, but it's in the process of getting published. Can you tell us what journal, or you want to wait?
Emma:No, I can I I I don't see why not. I mean, I don't think this is gonna put any pressure on the journal right now. It's under review by veterinary parasitology. We'll see what they think. I mean, you never know with the review process. They they might accept it eventually, they might not, but we started with them because they're sort of a really good catch-all journal for any sort of improvements in understanding of parasites and also procedural improvements, which is sort of what our study focused on. So we'll see what they think.
Sarah:Great. Okay, well, let's jump in. Let's talk about kind of your goal and your mission and your objective, your hypothesis, all the kind of early stuff that you kind of were working with this undergrad and your goals here.
Emma:Sure. So this all kind of started from something I started to notice, because as you can tell from sort of my back record, I've sort of seen a few different laboratories that do parasitology research. I've had a chance to do some fellowships with labs elsewhere in the world as well. And I noticed that there's a lot of inconsistency in sort of how people manage fecal samples that they're bringing in for parasitology diagnostics. And also, I guess on a previous grant that I wrote, someone was worried because we were planning to have farms chip us samples and they were concerned because we didn't want those samples on ice packs. And the reason for that is we do a lot of advanced diagnostics on parasites. So most of the nematode species that we see in sheep and goats, if you look at a poop sample under a microscope, you can't actually tell which species are making the eggs that you're seeing. They all look pretty much the same. And so we then take those eggs and can grow them on into larvae that we can then genetically sequence to figure out what those species are. Right now we mostly do it for research purposes, but I've got collaborators at other institutions that are getting pretty close to making it affordable and practical to use as a diagnostic test. So not only do you know how many eggs per gram you've got in your poop sample, you also know who's making those eggs per gram. Maybe it's something like hemonchus, and you have a chance to maybe use a narrow spectrum treatment instead of the broad spectrum treatments we use all the time.
Sarah:Awesome. Yeah, because mostly we just go, if they're strong giles and you're anemic, you have homonchus, right? Like do what we can do at this point. So that's awesome.
Emma:And and one of the challenges we have with our producers is especially on the goat side of things, a lot of them are very small-scale producers, and so they just don't have the handling facilities to get their hands on their animals often enough to do things like check FOMAC scores to see if there really is anemia. Um, and so they can collect poopies easily enough, but if they're not actually checking for anemia, we don't have that link to know for sure using a simple and effectively free test once you know what you're doing. Right. But in order to actually do the sequencing, we do need to grow those eggs out to larvae. And then we're talking about hemonchus, everyone is fairly familiar, it's a tropical worm. It does not like cold. And so I've done some past work which I'm not sure where it's at in the kind of process to publication, but we found that even if you only refrigerate a poop sample for two hours, it already can impact the proportions of hemonchus that will hatch to larvae and then that you will identify as a contributor to that parasite infection. So we were avoiding chilling things, but then people were worried, like, oh, if you're shipping things over land, could they potentially be hatching and then you're going to underestimate your burdens? And that's where this project came from was okay, let's look at a couple of things I've seen in different laboratories. We like to keep things in sealed Ziploc bags. Does it really make that much of a difference if you then add chilling to them? I've also seen another laboratory where they're trying to reduce the oxygen because there's a thought that if eggs are exposed to air, that will then trigger them to hatch. And so if you mix poop with the eggs in it in water, the water is effectively keeping it from being exposed to the air, and so that'll keep them from hatching instead. So we were trying out a few different variants of keeping air out of the poop by having it in a sealed plastic bag, keeping air out of the poop by suspending it in water, and then adding chilling in a fridge or not, to see what impact that had on our development rates of the eggs. So you can see that microscopically as the egg goes from what we call a morula, just a ball of cells in the fresh poop sample, to an actual little larva that's all curled up inside the eggshell.
Sarah:Let's back up a step. How did you infect the animals for these studies? Just for people who don't, you know, do research and you know, I know I don't you guys have Ayacuk up there, I assume, right?
Emma:Absolutely, yeah. So we've got animal care protocols, but in this case, we didn't have to worry about infecting the animals because we were just using field samples from animals that were in research studies. So these were animals out on a farm seeing the nematode parasites just because of normal farm management practices while they were grazing outside. So we were actually able to get pretty easy approval for our animal use because we were effectively offering a free diagnostic test to these people. There was no infection deliberately, minimal risk for the farmers to be going out and collecting poop samples from these animals, either directly from source or picked up fresh off the ground. So we weren't actually infecting animals, we were just using animals that had infections as it was.
Sarah:Perfect. I love that. Great. I was really hoping that you would look at the difference between what it is in an inside turned-out glove versus a cottage cheese container, because that's how most of my samples are. Either in a glove, which I guess would be the same as a Ziploc bag.
Emma:You don't usually get very much air out of your turned out inside-out gloves, but I mean I've definitely had to deal with samples like that before. And a lot of the time I kind of look at them and go, oh boy, I'm not really sure that this is gonna keep the air out nicely.
Sarah:And the cottage cottage cheese containers, very common for me. I get lots and lots of those. So but I guess we'll stick with what you did. That seems that seems good enough. Okay, so our whole goal here is to see how to store them, to storage affect it, um, and not only for fecal egg count, but hopefully one day we can easily and readily differentiate the species of the parasites we're looking at.
Emma:Exactly. We're really trying to find some way of storing poop in sort of the short to intermediate term that will balance our need to have those samples still have actually effective egg counts in them. We don't want hatching before we have a chance to count them, while still keeping those eggs alive so that if we wanted to do that further testing, we can actually still grow them up.
Sarah:And just I've been thinking about this, like, I mean, you're looking at the lab, but for me, you know, the thought process is okay, you left the poop in my drop box. You know, what is it doing to that until I get home? And what is it doing when it's summer versus when it's winter? And like, you know, I always tell people you need to collect the freshest sample. You know, if it looks to be all dry, do not collect that. Um, you know, so like I think the like practical stuff, you know, how long we put it in our fridges for before we have time to run it. I literally run my fecal samples in my basement. My teenage daughter, her job is that she preps them for me. I pay her six bucks a sample, unless it's gross, then I have to pay her more. Um and you know, I just do the microscope work, but sometimes, you know, I'm sending them out to the lab. And so, like, this is like this is why I just love this because it's so practical for the vets, for the producers. And, you know, you can also help people who run these labs know the ideal way. So like I just it was cheap and easy study, and like I just I love these because they're so practical and down-to-earth. And it's not like, you know, some of the studies that we talk about that are so important, but they're like the first step of like 10 studies to get to something that's gonna affect our medicine. But this is gonna affect our medicine tomorrow, right?
Emma:Absolutely. It's it's instant. I mean, how often do you walk into a vet clinic and like someone comes back with a handful of poop samples, no one can handle them right away. And so what's the first instinct? Chuck them in the fridge until someone could deal with them, right? And so that was the whole idea behind this, is something that everyone who's in small ruminant practice does on a regular basis and doesn't even think about it. And frankly, even on the research side where we're doing the more complicated stuff, like you have different labs that do all of these different methods, and we just don't really talk about them. And I don't know, I mean, I went into the literature and I couldn't find anything where people had actually looked at different mechanisms to say, here's how they stack up. Like the best that we could find was a study decades ago where they used actually similar containers to your cottage cheese containers with horse poop that they either kept the lid on or off. And that's that's the best that we've got. So we were really interested in kind of delving into that question to give people that answer of okay, if you've got a poop sample, what should you do with it? Like if you want to make sure that you have the best fecal counts, or if you want to make sure that you actually have a sample you can do something more with later if you need to.
Sarah:Yeah. And I think the kind of rule of thumb I've gone off, and I was thinking about where did I even get this from one of my early mentors was like, you can keep it in the fridge for up to a week if you've collect if it's like been put in the fridge within an hour or two of collection. Well, that's just completely random. Like, I have no idea where that information came from. So please give me better. Okay, so you were doing this other study. So you were already collecting fecal samples from both sheep, sheep and goats. So let's talk about your materials and methods.
Emma:Sure. So we had a group of goat farms that were sending us monthly samples, and we had sheep farms that were also, I think in the sheep study, they were actually physically going out to those farms and bringing back samples. And so when we got in samples for the studies, we needed individual animal level counts. For this study that I did for AASRP, we needed slightly bigger samples just so we had enough poop, and that'll become apparent why in a minute. And so we started with a baseline count on all the individual samples, and anytime we had samples that had at least, I think it was 300 eggs per gram, was our cutoff. We needed a decent number of eggs so that we could then follow those eggs over time in smaller aliquots of poop. When we got samples that met that cutoff, we would combine equal amounts of samples that met the cutoff until we had a nice sort of test poop sample that had at least, I think it was something like 16 grams of poop in it. Like bigger sample than you need to count, but big enough that we could actually follow it for a period of time.
Sarah:Okay, that was one of my questions. Because when you talked about in what I read how you had combined them, I that was my question. How did you decide how to what to combine? And like, okay, so they had to have similar eggs per gram.
Emma:Yeah, we they had to meet our minimum cutoff so that we actually had enough eggs that we could actually track over time.
Sarah:Right, right, right. Okay.
Emma:And so we then did another count on the pooled sample to make sure that we actually knew what the count was for that pooled sample. It was an actual count rather than just kind of a guess based on what went in there. And then we split that pooled sample across two sealed plastic bags with roughly five grams apiece. And then we had, I think it would have been six aliquots, where we took one gram of poop, mixed it with 10 mils of water, and then that was our storage condition. And so we had half of one bag at room temperature, one bag in the fridge, and then half of our water samples in the fridge and half at room temperature as well. And so then what my undergrad student was doing was every day after day zero, so when we actually set up our replicate, she would then go in and take one aliquot from each of the four conditions, so water at room temperature and fridge, and bag at room temperature and fridge, and then do another fecal egg count on it to see whether the egg count was changing, were we losing eggs? Because if you do a flotation, eggs hatched, it's now not going to float anymore, so you don't see it. So were we losing egg count? And also she checked the first hundred maximum eggs to see what the stage of the egg was. Was it a Morula like what we expect in very fresh poop, or was it now larvated when like what we see when the poop starts to get a little bit older? And then she did that for three days after we set up our kind of pooled sample that we were using under these conditions. She ran 27 samples, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're talking about four different storage conditions times three days, that's a lot of fecal egg counts and a lot of checking eggs for development. And we went with three days, even though you might have a little bit of a longer time period for a couple of reasons. One was just sort of thinking about in vet practice, like you'd hope you wouldn't have a poop sample sitting around for three days, more than three days in your fridge. Like maybe if you toss it in on a Friday afternoon by Monday, you'd look at it again. But the other reason is I did not want to kill my student. Um, it's a logistical thing. Like we like our students to be coming into the lab and working during business hours when we can keep an eye on them and make sure everything is going okay. So I didn't want to have to have her keep coming in over weekends when there's not really anybody around.
Sarah:Do you have some way to control when day zero started? Do you know what I mean? Like, was there any sort of time lapse from collection to your day zero?
Emma:So we didn't have total control over that, but we did have records of what day the poop was actually collected. And so we did factor that into our analyses. So if there was a longer like period, we actually checked to see if that made a difference between the difference from when we started and the end of our three-day observation window. And it didn't actually make a difference at all if the poop was collected the day that we set it up or five days before, which was the maximum time frame when we had farms that were mailing in samples, and so potentially they might have collected like on a Friday, and then they shipped it on the Monday, and then it was like one or two days until it actually arrived on campus. Okay.
Sarah:All right, so we looked at a lot of poop under the microscope.
Emma:Mm-hmm. Quite a lot, yeah. My student got very, very good at fecal accounts. Sure she did.
Sarah:And I I, you know, I doubt she made six dollars a fecal sample because she would have made that would have been good money for her.
Emma:I think she we have like a set amount that we're allowed to pay them because the the nice thing about this was so part of the beauty of this grant is I'm an early career researcher, and it was one of my first few grants that I got after starting here at the University of Guelph as a faculty member. Um and so because I'm an early career researcher, the AASRP basically paid for the consumables for the study, and I was able to get a little university grant special for early career researchers to pay for the students. So awesome. That's great. She got reimbursed pretty, pretty well, all things considered, and especially also. Because of the great experience and yeah.
Sarah:Awesome. All right. Well, what'd she find? Do tell.
Emma:So what we've actually found is that refrigeration isn't actually apparently the major driver for keeping eggs from hatching or from developing. It's the oxygen exposure. So the fecal egg counts didn't change over the three-day observation period. So it didn't matter whether it was in a bag or in water, or if it was refrigerated or at room temperature. The egg counts were not statistically different from baseline to the third day of observation, which is great. It's telling us the eggs are not hatching, the counts are staying pretty stable. Okay. Where it did make a difference was in how the eggs were developing from that fresh Moriola stage to larva stage within the egg still. And so what we found was that the samples that we put into the water tended to stay at Moriola stage for longer, whereas the ones in bags, they went from Moriola to larva within about 24 hours, but they didn't go beyond that. So they just went to larvated and then they did not hatch. So that's interesting because if you're doing a test that depends on having eggs sort of at a more uniform development stage, potentially, and this is more for a research basis, you might actually want to suspend them in water to keep them from developing further. But for a more practical purpose, if you're worried about fecal egg counts, does not matter. As long as you are sealing your bags really nice and tight, and we do find Ziploc bags are better for this than gloves, because you can sort of like put your little pellets in the bag and then really force the air out and seal them. And if you really want to get fancy, you can do vacuum sealing. But we didn't do that, we just used regular like dollar store sealable bags, not super expensive. Then yeah, it doesn't matter if you put it in the fridge or not. And in fact, from the other research we've done in the past, if you are at all interested in doing these advanced tests that involve growing the eggs beyond egg stage, it's better to just keep them at room temperature if you're only going to be looking at them within two to three days.
Sarah:So great. So when the people leave it in my drop box and I've forgotten it for 24 hours, I'm still giving them good answers.
Emma:Yeah, if if as long as like we we didn't look at super, super hot conditions, but as long as it's relatively ambient temperature, the fact that you're keeping it sort of room temperature-ish isn't gonna make a difference. If it's in the drop box and it's just kind of clinic nice temperature, it's gonna be just fine.
Sarah:How about if it's February?
Emma:If it's February, as long as it's not freezing, still should still be just fine, right? So if it's refrigerator temperatures, counts are not gonna be affected. The only thing is that if you then want to do some ancillary diagnostics on it, you might have some trouble growing out those tropical worm species. So if it does freeze, though, you should request a new sample. You think absolutely freezing can cause problems because when poop freezes, you get little ice crystals, and the ice crystals can actually puncture eggshells, and then when you try and float them, the salt gets into the egg instead of around the egg, and so they sink rather than floating, and so that could lead to underestimation.
Sarah:Okay. So for those of us in the northern hemisphere, that could be a problem. And for those of you down in Texas, if it's really hot, you probably need to be more conscientious of that also. I don't think up here where we live, it probably ever gets so hot that it's a huge problem.
Emma:But I don't know. I feel like again, I'm showing my Canadianisms here. We tend to get pretty hot temperatures, upwards of, you know, we can even get up as high as 35 degrees Celsius, which is is pretty hot. Like that's a day when you want to be spending in the shade. And so if you're out collecting samples on a day like that, you probably want to get them indoors as soon as possible because I doubt you're ever going to be getting quite that hot in any building or in the shade.
Sarah:Right. Okay, okay. So we're less concerned about refrigeration, and you're probably fine for three or four days. And so a sealed ziploc bag or something airtight, like you know, I usually mail my stuff to the lab in a little Tupperware that screws the lid on.
Emma:We should be good. Yeah, pretty much. As long as you're keeping it nice and even temperature, ideally not frozen. For the kind of screw cap containers, just because they usually do have that little bit of air in the container. For those guys, you might want to just cover them with a little bit of water, potentially, if it's going to be going a long distance. But if you're gonna have same-day shipment, then it shouldn't make a huge difference.
Sarah:Okay, okay. Wow. This is good to know, especially that we haven't been like, you know, falsifying data all these years by letting it sit out in my Dropbox for 24 hours. All right. And so is there anything more like with computer statistics or any of the materials and methods from data analysis that was interesting?
Emma:I think we kind of covered the major things. The closest that we got there was, so we actually ended up with few of our goat samples meeting our kind of threshold for being included. And so we included the species of origin into our analyses. We only ended up with, I think, two goat samples in the study. The rest of the 27 samples were all from sheep. And interestingly, there did seem to be some slightly different relationships in the goats, but of course, we can't draw too, too many conclusions from only two goat samples. So in future, we might need to follow it up and see that even when we've got host species where they have fairly similar poop characteristics and it's the same parasite species, we expect potentially the host actually makes a difference. So we might actually need to go and have a look at things like whether goats really do have any differences in this, or even look at things like potentially camelids or maybe even cattle to see if that makes a difference. And and cattle might be cool in particular because their poop is so very different in how it comes out relative to sheep and goats. It's much more wet. So perhaps they have a better time kind of keeping those eggs from developing.
Sarah:Hmm. Yeah, that would be interesting. Good to know. I had another question. What was it?
Emma:All right. So the goat study that I was doing in my lab is all based around trying to find host immune responses that help control parasite infections sustainably, right? We we know there's a huge problem with drench resistance out there. It's it's it's unescapable. Everyone who has sheep or goats will probably have run up against it. And so we'll never be able to move entirely away from using drenches, but we need to look more at some of these other strategies to try and help keep the drenches that we do have lasting and working for longer than just using them as a first resort. So my lab and my collaborator have been looking a lot at trying to better understand how sheep and goats make antibody responses to parasites that can then protect them when they're out grazing and being exposed to these parasites. And this particular study was taking a test called the Carla saliva test. Carla stands for carbohydrate larval antigen. It's a marker on the surface of all of these nematode larvae that sheep and goats are exposed to, that they can make antibodies against, which then blocks those larvae from actually infecting the animal. And animals with more of that antibody in their saliva, or at least sheep with more antibody, have lower parasite burdens. But we haven't looked as much in goats, so we decided, okay, let's have a look at goats. And most of the work that developed this test happened in New Zealand, where sheep and goats are outgrazing year-round. We can't do that in Canada. I'm sure many places kind of in the northern parts of the US can't do it either. Like we're lucky if we get six, seven months of grazing out of the year as opposed to 12. So we were really interested to see whether that actually worked in goats, and so we followed a few farms worth of goats over a couple of years to see whether there was an association between their antibody levels and their parasitism.
Sarah:Interesting. Ann, do you have results?
Emma:Working on it. The doctoral student that was working on that study, the the two years of the study were 2023 to 2024. She's working on getting her thesis put together now. We have found some interesting results that seem to align with what we've seen in sheep, where the parasite exposure in the same year as you measure the antibody tend to be correlated. So if you have more parasite exposure, you have more antibody. But it looks like it might be the case that if you measure antibody in goats in one year, those goats will then potentially have less parasite infection level in the second year. So we need to go and investigate that further because our study wasn't really designed to follow animals, the same group of animals across multiple years. We were lucky enough to have a small subset of them that we did follow across the two years, but we're then going to need to follow that up to just make sure that what we're seeing actually makes sense and is more applicable across a bigger group of animals.
Sarah:So in the sheep studies, were these antibodies something that lasted for a while, or is it kind of like your flu vaccine you need to get every year?
Emma:So it is similar to the flu vaccine, where anytime you're making antibody at a mucosal surface, respiratory in the gut, doesn't matter, they tend not to be as long-lasting as antibody in the whole body. But that being said, we did find some interesting things because we saw that in the sheep, their antibody levels did decline over the course of the winter. But in the second spring, when they turned back out onto pasture, they went flying way higher and way more quickly than they did in the first year, which sounds more like what we kind of classically think of as a memory immune response. So the immune system is primed to recognize that marker quicker and more strongly the second time around, which traditionally wasn't thought to really be possible with this type of response. But I've got other research where we're trying to untangle that and use knowledge from humans and mice and how they develop responses to this type of antigen. But probably best we not get into that because now we're getting into the sort of like, you know, 10 steps before this actually makes any sense in the real world type research.
Sarah:Well, that's yeah, that's great. And so how would that be applicable? Like how, like, what would be the the step, like what's the goal of this SENI that like is usable? Do you do you know what I mean?
Emma:These antibody levels are heritable. We can selectively breed for animals with more antibody. So if you are measuring antibody in breeding stock, those animals then tend to produce offspring with better antibody levels. And so you can improve the genetic capability of a herder flock to resist the parasites themselves over time by selection. They've been doing this for quite a few years now in New Zealand and had really, really good success. The the folks we work with in New Zealand who developed the test, they've got some flocks that have been doing selection based on this for about 20 years now because they were involved with the research right from the get-go and they pretty much don't have to use drenches more than about once or twice a year.
Sarah:Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. I mean, we all out, you know, in the small ruminant world understand that you want to select for your more than selecting for your really parasite resistant, get rid of the ones that aren't parasite resistant. So we all know there are, you know, genetic components, and you guys are just now telling us what those are and how that works and what we're actually selecting for, I guess is kind of how how my layman brain thinks of it.
Emma:Well, I mean, this is one mechanism that is involved. Immune responses are horrifically complicated. I I had to delve into this for my own PhD years ago, and every year there's more and more information that comes out. So this is one branch of it that seems to work really well. But the challenge is a lot of the different branches that are involved in picking animals that have better immunity or more accurately getting rid of the ones that just don't seem to manage to make a response ever, actually have drawbacks if you breed for strong levels. So, for example, we are looking at an antibody type called IgA. If you are looking at an antibody type called IgE, which is the one that's classically involved in allergies, well, if you breed for animals with a lot of that type of antibody, yes, it might help protect against the parasites, but they also tend to have more diarrhea because it triggers that kind of strong inflammatory response, just like in people with allergies. So that's not as desirable. And we've picked this particular version because it doesn't seem to be associated with as many negative things. We have actually better performance and productivity in animals with better antibody levels, and so we don't seem to have any drawbacks that we've appreciated yet that outweigh the drawback of not having it and then having the parasites be a bigger issue.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah, right. There's always everything's always connected. Frustrating. I mean, we've definitely seen that in the cattle world with AI, how we select for milk production or calf size and have negative effects from that. Wow, that's super interesting though. And I mean, this is exactly, you know, what we're gonna have to do because you know, there's only so many dewormers and knock on wood. I feel so lucky to live up here in the north where safeguard still works and ivermectin still works. I have very few herds and flocks that I see resistance in, which and most of them have come from the south.
Emma:Dude, you are so lucky. We like we we did testing to see like how many of our flocks that were in our study with the goats had resistance to safeguard. And it's basically 100%. Like we use that as one of our jump scare graphs is if you want to see how bad the problem is and why we need to talk about other methods of controlling parasites. Here is the graph showing safeguard. And my grad student loves to use like green for susceptible parasites and then fire colors for ones that have resistance traits. And like she'll put up the graph, like just explain what the bars are, and then put up all the farms, and every single farm is all just red and yellow and orange.
Sarah:Like there's been these in Ontario?
Emma:These are in Ontario, Canada, yep.
Sarah:Wow. I guess I just, you know, I really assumed this was like a southern United States problem. I mean, I didn't have any idea where Canada stood.
Emma:Yeah, we have we have massive problems, and I mean that's just for safeguard where we know what the actual genetic components in the parasites are that underlie resistance for your your macrocyclic lactones, so your ivermectin, that is a lot harder, and you really have to go and do like your drench check, for example, to know whether you've truly got resistance or not. But the situation's pretty bad. My advisor did a study coming up on 10 years ago now, I believe, maybe a little bit more, where they actually went and did drench checks on farms for a variety of different dewormers, and more than 90% of the farms that were reporting that drench wasn't working truly did have drench resistance in their parasites, and more than 90% of those were resistant to safeguard and ivomech. So it's we we don't think the situation is any better in goats, if anything, probably worse, because we know that goats are just not quite as good at resisting parasites as sheep.
Sarah:Yeah.
Emma:So what's the go-to for most of your farmers up there for uh most of our farmers still seem to be using uh safeguard, so there's still enough functionality that it's at least knocking down burdens enough to keep the animals from dying. We've started to have some uptake of flucaver, so closantyl for the hemonchus, especially because a lot of the time during the grazing season, that's the major species we have during the summer. And so rather than hitting with the big hammer that hits everything, why not try and target hemonchus specifically? And because flucaver has only recently been approved in Canada, there doesn't seem to be a lot of resistance to that just yet. But again, we're trying to encourage our farmers to like not go overboard, like we want that drug to be available as your last resort, but maybe let's try and look at management factors in managing parasites and keep the burdens low so that you only have to go in and do your selective treatment with flukeur.
Sarah:Interesting, yeah. So I'm sorry I don't know this. Can producers get dewormers over the counter in Canada or do they have to get them from their vets?
Emma:I think they are changing the rules. There were some dewormers that were available over the counter, but I think that they are now making them all prescription only.
Sarah:Okay. I think that'll help. I know it's such a pain, but you know, since antibiotics have stopped being over the counter, it's I think it's way better. I mean, it's better for my clients, even though they may not agree with that statement. It's just nice to have a little bit more control.
Emma:We just like we need to make sure everyone is well educated because I mean, as a pathologist, I see case histories that come in all the time on post-mortem animals, and some of the antimicrobial use that is happening worries me sometimes.
Sarah:Yeah, I think so. What I have found with my personal clients is not that they aren't educated because a lot of them do know, but the problem is they are treating with their emotions and not their brains. You know, like especially like so I do a lot of backyard for age pets, right? So they pets, key word there. So their animal looks at them sideways and they're gonna give them everything they have in their cupboard.
Emma:With our local industries, our producers in both the sheep and goat side are incredibly progressive and switched on, and they really have a lot of knowledge. They like many of them already have advanced graduate degrees in like business and agriculture. So they really like they know what they're doing. And even if they don't, like they they have generations of experience in often in in the industry. So it's not that the producers are lacking in the knowledge, it's that we are not actually graduating enough veterinarians with the knowledge and interest in small ruminants to really be able to support our farmers appropriately. And so that was kind of the educational angle. And that's kind of on folks like me in academia still to sort of try and help the veterinarians that were graduating understand, you know, that really prudent antimicrobial use starts with veterinarians, especially now that we're moving more and more to having things be available only through prescription rather than over the counter.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah. And as ASARP, we're trying our best to, you know, we I don't know who your faculty liaison is for ASRP. I know we have one at pretty much all the vet schools in North America, but we're trying to reach out to those students and educate them also. So if there's anything we can do to help you, you know, let us know. We want to, you know, we put on a student symposium every year, and maybe we need to, you know, make sure it always has a component of parasites in it. But yeah, well, this has been a great talk. Is there anything about these studies that you want to add before we move on?
Emma:Just again, emphasizing like how none of what I do would be possible without the involvement of sort of these amazing producers that have partnered with us to make things happen, and also actually the veterinarians that support them, because that's always like the two places I go when I need to recruit people are to our local producer agencies and to our local veterinary suppliers of care to the kind of food animal, farm animal sector to say, hey, you know, we've got this going on. Do you have any clients that might be interested that you could pass along my information to? So it really is a team effort to sort of do research and you know, just how much we in the research world appreciate the time investment and support of everybody kind of all links in the chain.
Sarah:Awesome. Yeah. What's next on the horizon for you?
Emma:Probably chasing that GOAT project that I mentioned, like the multi year study, we really want to try and Follow a bigger group of animals across at least two years and then not only do that, but actually have a look at their offspring. So we didn't really have any multi-generational stuff going on in our pilot study that was just, does this antibody test even work in our goats? Now we want to actually take that further to the next step. Who knows? Maybe I'll be coming and looking for some more support to do the next stage of okay, let's maybe do more goat samples now and see if that kind of difference between the sheep and goats we saw with our two goat samples actually does apply. And maybe it's going to be species dependent how we need to handle poop to make sure we get the best out of them.
unknown:Yeah.
Emma:And yeah, just really continuing to chase, understanding what the heck is going on with these immune responses and how can we help our farmers with keeping healthy, happy, productive animals with a minimum of stress to the farmers and the best animal health and welfare we can give the goats and the sheep. I love it. I love it.
Sarah:And then, as I'm sure you read, the final question that I ask everybody, and it's interesting because so the question is what do you see as the next problem that researchers need to think about and address in small ruminant medicine? And so many people say the parasite is true. So you're already doing it, but what what what's your answer?
Emma:I am definitely super biased, and I think that the parasites are a big issue. I focus mostly on the worms, but the indoor parasites like coxie are also a huge problem that I get asked about all the time when I present at producer uh meetings, and that's never gonna go away because the worms are such a problem that people don't want to put their animals outside, and when you bring them inside in big numbers, you get coxie problems. So you're gonna have one or the other, and sometimes both. But there's so many other problems that are going on. Like we have our goat industry is constantly growing because we've got a lot of demand from especially our ethnic kind of market for sheep and goat products, and so there's huge challenges associated with dairy quality assurance on the goat side of things, especially as we have lots and lots of new producers getting into things and just trying to look after that. But I mean, certainly, what am I gonna keep working on? I'm gonna keep trying to find ways of helping with the parasites because again, I worked in the UK for a couple of years, and they're like Europe is pretty advanced when it comes to animal health and welfare and the rules that are required, and they're moving a lot to having a requirement for grazing species to actually be allowed to spend some time outside grazing every day. And so for those farms that have been trying to avoid parasites by keeping their animals inside all the time, I can see it coming that eventually, probably we in North America are gonna follow suit and actually have some of these rules that are allowing animals to have that behavioral enrichment that they they do normally have if you leave an animal to its own devices. And so let's maybe try and get ahead of that issue and be ready for the challenges that we're gonna have with parasitism if and when animal welfare rules require our farms to actually let their animals out to graze some grass a bit every day, because we know that if that happens, the parasites are coming, and we gotta be ready.
Sarah:Yeah, and I mean there's absolutely no point in pretending like the world's not moving that way, and like it should, right? We should all want the best welfare for our animals.
Emma:So let's get ahead of the issues that we can foresee coming when those changes come in place rather than being reactionary, because that will just save everyone a lot of headache and a lot of animal stress, basically.
Sarah:Yeah. And if you know these sort of actions are coming from inside the world of ag, if we are like promoting it ourselves and not letting people outside of the agriculture world that don't understand tell us what to do, it's worse, right? Like let us self-regulate and let us say what's best for our animals and how to keep them the healthiest, or or say it before somebody else says it.
Emma:Exactly. And just maintain that trust, right? Because if there's transparency and people see that we are trying to do the best that we can, people are more likely to give us that trust and allow us to actually continue with self regulation.
Sarah:Great. Yes. I love it. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time and have a great day.
Emma:Awesome. Thanks, you two.
