We take herd health seriously here at JK Herd It All. To help make sure that all of our goats are healthy and happy, we do an annual biosecurity panel to test for the most common dangerous diseases.
We send samples to WADDL, UBRL, and/or WVDL. They’re among the most trusted labs in the country for the accurate health testing of goats.
Please note that blood tests are not foolproof and may be prone to false positives AND false negatives. After people started having false positives on the Johne’s blood test, a lot of us have turned to the more accurate pooled fecal PCR instead/in addition.
Now that our herd has grown, the testing is very pricey (about $50 per goat altogether), so we plan to test EVERYONE at least 2-3 years in a row and then start doing it more intermittently – maybe the does one year and bucks the next, or a select few from each group, rotating each year. Or maybe just rotate tests but do every goat? We haven’t decided yet!
The CAE panel is one of the most important health tests because a dam can transmit CAE to her kids via milk. We bought all of our goats from herds that either test or raise their goats on CAE prevention. Just to be safe, we are doing the test here every year, too, at least until we close our herd. After we have a few years of negative health tests under our belt, we will consider dam-raising our goat kids. Until then, we’ll keep bottle raising them!
Most people only test for CAE, but since we have so many cattle farms in our area, we also do the panel for Johne’s. Johne’s is spread through manure, including through hay that has been fertilized by infected cattle. Some reports claim that it can even spread through pasteurized milk purchased at the store!
The CL blood test has debatable accuracy with a lot of false positives and negatives, but we’ve always done it anyway because it’s part of the panel. We’ll probably stop the CL blood test at some point, because it’s a waste of money. If one of our goats ever develops an abscess, we test that – that’s the only truly accurate method for CL.
We’re considering adding tests for Brucellosis and TB so that we can sell goats to Iowa and other states that require those tests for import. Those diseases aren’t really a thing in our area, but both can spread to humans through unpasteurized milk, so we definitely see why some states require it.