A calf can look “fine” and still be losing ground in the lungs and that’s exactly why BRSV keeps costing farms money. We sit down with Dr. John Ellis to unpack a rare head-to-head comparison of two widely used intranasal bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) vaccines in colostrum fed calves, then zoom out to what the data means for day-to-day vaccine decisions in the field.
We start with the basics of BRSV epidemiology and why maternal antibodies from colostrum don’t eliminate the problem, they simply delay it until that predictable window of susceptibility opens. From there, we dig into study design choices that matter to practicing veterinarians, including why seropositive calves can be a more “real world” model than the seronegative animals often used for licensing studies.
Then we get practical. We talk lung lesion scores, what “modest” differences might mean when calves face production stress and co-infections, and why objective physiology like arterial PaO2 can reveal effects that mild clinical signs don’t show. On the immunology side, we explore mucosal IgA, systemic IgG, and why a fast anamnestic response can be the difference between a calf that shrugs off infection and one that slides into trouble. We also challenge the overreliance on p-values and make the case for looking hard at scatter plots and variability before you trust a single headline number.
We close with a bigger industry takeaway: two vaccines can share similar listed components yet behave differently due to formulation, attenuation, or dose details that aren’t always transparent in veterinary medicine. If you care about evidence-based bovine respiratory disease control, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a rating and review so more practitioners can find the show.
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