Joint ill

[Parker]

Hey guys I'm new to the site, I'm a small cow calf operation that raises a few orphaned beef calves every year on the bottle. A farmer just dropped off a week old bull calf (brangus). He said the calf had to be pulled and had went down hill since birth and felt as if the moma wasn't caring for it. I think it has joint ill, I've never battled the illness before but I hear it's tuff and I have a few questions. First is it contagious. Second would injectable penicillin be suitable to treat. The calf is taking a bottle great but it's joints are swollen and is very tender to walk. I'm giving it a good milk replacer and electroylits. I don't mind the cost of antibiotics if it's curable but I don't want to prolong death of its inevitable either. Thanks open to any advice

 

[angus9259]

It's not directly contagious. It's treatable but not with pen. My vet recommends nuflor. It will take a looooong time and be veeeerrry expensive and a looooot of work. Get the right meds from your vet and the sooner you start the better.

 

[A.J.]

As already stated, It's a lot of work and a long treatment, but they can pull through it many times. Some may have more long term effects from it than others. My vet had me treat with Excede and banamine for several weeks and I had pretty good results. By the time calf was old enough to wean, you couldn't tell he had ever had an issue. Good luck.

 

[wbvs58]

If you have pennicillin to hand get a big dose into him and keep it up. It works better than you think with joint ill but get some topshelf stuff also as soon as you can.

Ken

 

[dun]

The only one we successfully treated for joint/navel ill recovered but it required massive frequent doses (off label) of penicillin. Get with your vet, it took a month of teratment to get ours over it. She turned out to be a good cow but always had issues with her udder having severe edema right when she calved.

 

[talltimber]

Didn't make it to the joints, luckily, but for whatever reason I had a few cases of navel ill this last calving season. It was the first season that I had iodined the navels too, weird, since I have heard of a lot of folks treating the navel like that and thought maybe I would head off a problem. I'm sure it didn't cause any of the problems, don't know how many I would have had without treating with iodine, might not have had any. I got with the vet, treated with pen for a few days to a week seems like, washing and retreating with iodine. They all recovered thankfully. The had swelled up about like lemon-size or so.

 

[angus9259]

Didn't make it to the joints, luckily, but for whatever reason I had a few cases of navel ill this last calving season. It was the first season that I had iodined the navels too, weird, .

My vet says naval dipping is a waste of time. I've done it and not done it with no apparent affect on naval ill. Seems more affected by rain / mud than anything I do.