PSVIII-16 Evaluating navel disinfection practices and health outcomes in newborn beef calves in Canada: A pilot-study.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research indicates that not disinfecting the umbilical cord of newborn calves can contribute to navel infections, potentially leading to secondary complications like respiratory illness and diarrhea. This pilot-study aimed to: 1) survey the prevalence of navel disinfection practices in newborn beef calves in Canada and 2) assess the effects of two navel treatment methods using either navel dipping or a spraying with a 7% iodine tincture on morbidity and visual clinical outcomes. An online survey was distributed via social media and at a beef industry event in Alberta in March of 2025. Morbidity records of 85 crossbred Angus male and female calves (n = 42-43 per treatment) from a single herd located in Olds, Alberta, Canada were recorded up to 40-days of age. A subsample (n = 26/treatment) of calves were assessed within the first 15-hour post-birth (baseline) and then weekly until day 28 using visual clinical parameters. After calving, cow-calf pairs were housed in outdoor pens with shelter, straw beddings, and ad libitum access to water and diet. The following clinical parameters were scored on a four-point scale in ascending order of severity: nasal and ocular discharges, cough, fecal consistency, and umbilical enlargement. Navel cord condition was assessed using a three-point scale, where 0 indicated the cord had fallen off, 1 indicated signs of desiccation, and 2 indicated moist tissue. Regarding the survey, from a total of 39 respondents, most were from Alberta (36%) and Ontario (36%), followed by Manitoba (26%) and Saskatchewan (3%). The majority (79%) were commercial producers, while 8% raised purebred and 13% had both. Calving locations varied, with 36% using indoor barns, 36% pasture, and 23% utilizing outdoor pens or feedlots, while the remaining (5%) producers adjusted between barns and outdoor pens. A total of 36% of producers treated navels, 41% did not, and 23% treated them occasionally. Among those who applied treatments (23/39), 52% used 10% iodine tincture, 26% used 7% iodine, while the remaining used iodophor-based products (8%), povidone-iodine (4%), or did not apply any treatment (8%). Treatment timing varied, with 32% treating within an hour post-calving, another 32% between 1-6 hours, 27% between 6-24 hours, and the remaining producers applying treatments more than two days after calving. A total of 51% of producers reported identifying navel infections in their herds, while 49% had not observed any case. A total of 40 cases of morbidity was observed, being 14% pneumonia, 18% navel infection, and 1% diarrhea. However, no differences (P > 0.05; Proc GLIMMIX of SAS) were observed on morbidity or visual clinical parameters. A variability in navel disinfection practices among Canadian beef producers was found, but more research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of different disinfection methods on health outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".