Parasites, including worms, can cause over 50% of animal disease problems. The three most significant worms causing disease in cattle are:
Heavy parasite burdens in cattle can lead to serious disease, major economic loss due to lack of thrive, even death. Light infestations may exacerbate other diseases and cause less obvious ill-thrift.
Treatment of cattle for internal parasites can be delivered by three basic dosage methods:
Longer acting broader spectrum products including endectocides (products which kill both internal worms and external parasites such as lice and mange), are available in injectable and pour-on formulations. Treatment with endectocides has rapidly increased in recent years, due to their ease of use, improved effectiveness, longer duration of activity and broader range of parasites controlled. These factors have resulted in greater convenience, lower labour requirement, and reduced stress to animals and operators – particularly with pour-on treatment.
Choosing an effective and economic treatment combined with good pasture management is the key to successful parasite control programmes.
Some worm larvae will survive over winter and are effective in maintaining disease in the herd. Warm, moist weather favours grass growth. Unfortunately, it also favours the development of worm larvae on pasture. It takes three weeks for larvae which are picked up by grazing cattle to develop into adults and start laying eggs. So, to avoid adding to the level of pasture contamination, you must dose within three weeks of turnout. If you use a long-acting product, you can then leave longer periods between doses. For example, strategic use of Dectomax™ to control hoose allows up to 8 weeks between treatments. Yet, although cattle are well protected by such a treatment regime, it still allows for the development of the animal’s natural immunity to worms.
Dectomax at turnout and again 8 weeks later gives season long protection in set-stocked cattle.
Season long protection maximises health productivity, live weight gain and profitability at grass.
Failure to dose early in the year is false economy. Even with modern long-acting wormers, you will end up with extra dosing towards the end of the grazing season.
The worm dose given at housing time is probably the most important treatment that farmers have to give their cattle in the whole year. The appropriate dose given according to manufacturer’s recommendations will ensure that worms are eliminated from the animal and that expensive winter fodder is used to optimise productivity and efficiency, thus allowing cattle to thrive to their maximum.
Three key areas to target for treatment consideration are:
If fluke is a problem in your area make sure to use a flukicide that is effective against immature and adult fluke. Depending on the product such an all-round fluke dose is best given approximately two to six weeks after housing so that all stages are effectively killed.
Ensure that the worm dose you give is fully effective against stomach worms (Ostertagia), gut worms (Cooperia) and hoose.
With reliable labour difficult to come by, coupled with the difficulty of dosing heavy weanlings and stores, you should consider the labour-saving convenience of a pour-on. Dectomax Pour-on is highly effective in eliminating stomach and gut worms along with hoose, and its prolonged action means that the “housing dose” can be given up to five weeks before housing. Dectomax Pour-onis effective against mange and lice as well. An additional bonus with Dectomax Pour-on is that cattle will be protected from infestations of biting and sucking lice during housing, provided that all the animals are treated at the same time, and untreated animals are not subsequently added to the shed. No other endectocide has licensed long-acting claims against lice.
The most important thing to remember about any dose is to give it at the recommended rate for the weight of animal. Accurate estimation of each animal’s weight is vital as under dosing helps the development of resistance build-up.
Dectomax –The Difference that Delivers Results