11/21/2023:
Our veterinarian, Arne Vanhoudt, has earned his doctoral degree. He received his doctorate on June 12th for his research on bovine digital dermatitis (DD). This research was carried out at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Utrecht, under the supervision of Professor Dr Mirjam Nielen.
Arne: “Lesions of DD are the leading cause of infectious lameness in dairy cattle worldwide, thereby negatively affecting animal welfare and farm economics through production loss, decreased reproductive performance, treatment costs, and increased risk of culling. In Europe, about 85% of the herds are reported infected and within-herd DD prevalence ranges between 3 and 83%. This thesis focuses on the detection, prompt effective treatment, and control of DD on dairy herds.
In Chapter 2, an overview of the status quo on management of DD on dairy herds is given. In the next chapter we demonstrated that experienced scorers are well able to differentiate between photographs of feet affected by DD and photographs feet unaffected by DD. On the other hand, they were less able to identify specific lesion stages, including the M2 and M4 stage which are considered important stages regarding clinical impact and infection reservoir, respectively. In Chapter 4 we concluded that infrared thermography (IRT) is unlikely to be suited for automated identification of feet affected by DD due to the poor associations between maximum temperature of the plantar pastern region and the presence of M2 lesions or DD lesions in general.
In Chapter 5 we demonstrated that topical treatment of active, often painful, DD lesions with a copper and zinc chelates gel (coppergel) and bandage outperformed an enzyme alginogel and bandage in M-score improvement, with the majority of lesions transitioning to the chronic, often not painful, state. In contrast, treatment with the alginogel achieved improved wound healing progress compared with the coppergel. However, neither the coppergel nor the alginogel achieved high cure rates to healthy skin. In Chapter 6 we illustrated that a standalone identification of risk factors for DD together with associated advice to control these risk factors is insufficient to decrease the prevalence of DD in dairy herds. Chapter 7 concludes the thesis with a general discussion providing a reflection on insights gained and suggestions for future research on the diagnosis, treatment, and control of DD in dairy herds.”
Read the thesis