Calves are at highest risk of disease in the first few weeks of life. Diseases like bovine respiratory disease (BRD) that occur early in a calf’s life can have far-reaching negative impacts on health, welfare, and milk production. Disease detection can be subjective, but combining different diagnostic methods greatly improves early detection. For example, health scoring using standardized and validated schema in combination with thoracic ultrasound perform well at classification of health and disease. On the other hand, it is difficult to predict which calves will remain healthy or become affected by disease.

There is growing interest in the role of inflammatory profiles to describe immune response to infection. If validated, the addition of inflammatory biomarkers to the diagnostic scheme, could help with disease detection before changes on ultrasound are apparent or clinical signs worsen. This prospective cohort study will be conducted at a single dairy in New York State. The farm will be visited up to three times a week to enroll replacement dairy heifer calves aged 1 – 60 days as this is the period of highest health risk based on the farm’s recorded data. Predetermined health categories include: 1) healthy; 2) calves with BRD; and, 3) calves who have recovered from BRD. On the day of enrollment and any subsequent follow up examinations, calves will be restrained by personnel for clinical examination and sample collection of venous blood and nasal secretions for evaluation of inflammatory biomarkers. Data collection duration will be approximately 3 months to collect 68 calves for each of the three health categories (n = 204).

The goal of this work is to describe the systemic and local inflammatory profiles of haptoglobin, IL-10, TNF-α, and INF-γ in young calves that are healthy, sick, and recovered over the first 60 days of life. The objectives of this project are to compare the biomarker profiles in healthy calves, sick calves, and recovered calves. Our principal hypothesis is that these inflammatory biomarker profiles will differ between calves with BRD, healthy calves, and post-BRD calves. We expect to see a similar difference in local inflammatory biomarker profiles from nasal swabs collected from calves enrolled. Should our hypothesis prove correct, it is possible that inflammatory biomarker profiles of disease progression might yield insight into early BRD detection and recovery which could impact management decisions for pre-weaned dairy calves.