glesamiz
Member
Many interesting opinions. In some situations most may be correct and in some situations most may be wrong. Retained placentas can have a multitude of causes and if an occasional finding or without labwork on several affected cows the cause will not be determined. All cattle herds, beef or dairy, will at some time have RPs. without knowing the cause treatment is just your best guess and there are no hard and fast rules. Any cow with an RP, beef or dairy, can become toxic and deathly ill. Most do not and benign neglest will allow most cows to survive and to return to normal. Regardless of cause RP and the accompanying open cervix will result in delayed return to fertility, generally the longer it goes the longer the time to conception. Lutalyse, Oxytocin, estrogen, etc., etc., are used and have been for ions. There is no agreement on which treatment works and what doesn't. Depends on who happens to be the expert at the time. ( an expert is often the person who has nothing to lose by giving the advise and usually lives a long way aways.) The comment on flushing the uterus with quantities of water or VERY dilute antiseptic always has merit as it washes away debris and infection and tends to loosen the placental attachments. Antibiotics are generally useful as there is always infection with an open cervix. No reason to wait any lengh of time unless you want to wait until the infection gets worse. A fact on antibiotics is that tetracycline(LA 200, etc.) is poor in the face of heavy debris and pus which is concentrated in the postpartum uterus and tetracycline is now ineffective against 90% of our Bacterial infections. In my opinion it is a poor drug for most problems although somewhat effective in footrot and pinkeye. Most Veterinarians now would not manually "clean" a cow with RP as it breaks off pieces of the placental attachment tissues to extend inflammation and infection and induce scarring of the lining of the uterus. Returning to causation: only knowledge of your own herd's prevailing diseases and nutritional status can allow you to prevent this problem and doing what your neighbor does may cause a lot of harm. If this is a significant problem in your herd some degree of diagnostic testing such as infectious reproductive disease evaluations and blood mineral levels may allow you to fine tune vaccinations and nutritional levels to prevent problems of this nature and others that may correlate. An example of what not to do: Some years back the diagnosis of copper deficiency was being accurately detected in some herds in our area. A local feed store was going to skin a fat hog by custom mixing a high copper supplement which they sold to many ranches that were never evaluated for their copper levels. What a great idea until there was numerous cattle that developed severe selenium deficiencies and disease problems they had never seen before as the unneeded copper had a negative correlation with selenium in the animal and created mass selenium deficiency which was worse than the copper defiency. Even this discussion thread can create such misguided actions. Advice is only good if it helps and mostly does no harm!! It is important to know as many facts as possible before making a diagnosis. As the above example, advice if followed can be very dangerous! I really enjoy some of these discussions but see a lot of BAD advice from people who have made many prior posts and other expect to be knowledgeable, this thread included.
G Lesamiz, DVM
G Lesamiz, DVM
