Treatment of Neonatal Calf Diarrhea

Abstract

When it comes to talking about therapy of calf diarrhea, as clinicians, we are faced with a diagnostic dilemma. Generally, we don't know the exact cause of the diarrheal illness in terms of the type of bacterial or viral agent(s) involved. We don't know if bacteremia or septicemia is present or is imminent as far as the young neonate is concerned and thus we don't know whether to include antibiotic therapy within our overall treatment regime. We don't know the pre-diarrheal body weight of the patient by which we could easily ascertain the fluid requirements and therefore we must resort to some other method of assessing body water loss. Likewise, we don't know the pre-diarrheal hematocrit value or total serum protein concentration of the animal and therefore can't rely on simple laboratory aids in order to calculate body water loss. We often don't know the immunoglobulin status of the animal so as to ascertain the need for plasma, serum or whole blood.