Opportunities COVID 19 has presented for bovine practice

Abstract

The coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been a major disruptor of people’s live since it went worldwide in spring of 2020. Although COVID-19 has resulted in personal inconvenience, economic impact and most importantly the loss of human life, there certainly have been advances made in medicine in response to the pandemic. Interestingly several of those were had already been instituted in veterinary medicine. The concept of the immune system going out of control i.e., cytokine storm, is a concept that we have hypothesized to occur with bovine respiratory disease (BRD) for almost a decade. The potent anti-inflammatory drugs i.e., dexamethasone, have been used as a supportive treatment for BRD for decades. Antiviral therapeutics which have been developed for COVID-19 have not been used extensively in veterinary medicine due to cost and concern about drug residues. Improvement of diagnostics using PCR for salivary samples has allowed easily collected samples to be examined. Lateral flow ELISA devices have allowed point of contact testing. In addition, devices like the Advance Animal Diagnostics flow cytometer developed for cattle prognostic testing have been applied to provide insight on human “cytokine storm” diseases. Although Covid-19 represented the first use of mRNA vaccines, other platform vaccines including baculovirus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and DNA vaccines have been used in the veterinary market. The effect of probiotics both in the enteric and respiratory tract enhances mucosal immunity.