Quid te exempta invat spinis de pluribus una?
(Out of so many thorns, how does one-extracted help you?)
-Horace-
It seemed a good idea at the time...
I would travel to the United Kingdom ally myself with veterinarians there sally forth to observe cases of an emerging transboundary animal disease of ruminants caused by a novel Orthobunyavirus: Schmallenberg virus.
First identified in Germany in 2011 named for the Westphalia town where the index cases hailed from veterinarians first observed a vague clinical syndrome in adult dairy cattle characterised by fever, diarrhoea and a drop in milk production. By the following spring however a more insidious manifestation was evident in the form of congenital malformations among lambs and calves, arthrogryposis hydranencephaly syndrome (AHS). To the casual observer AHS manifests as monsters neonatal ruminants twisted beyond recognition limbs frozen in flexion (arthrogryposis), tortured serpentine spines (cervical scoliosis, kyphosis, torticollis) brains filled with fluid (hydranencephaly), aborted foetuses, dummy lambs and calves, stillborns...
An uninvited guest likely arriving from Africa via a shipment of fresh flowers Schmallenberg virus (SBV) found a ready accomplice among the local European biting midge population Culicoides spp. which facilitated a transcontinental spread of the disease at an inexorable yet disheartening pace. Seeking a blood meal to reproduce female midges feasted upon the dense livestock herds and flocks of middle Europe transmitting SBV among the immunologically naive. By March 2012 SBV was established in the UK the SBV-infected midge vectors carried across the Pas de Calais by accommodating wind plumes to a bucolic southeast England. What the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe failed so precipitously to achieve in 1940-41 a 2 mm insect managed without even trying.
Awaiting the onslaught within England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were14.3 million breeding ewes and 3.4 million breeding cattle all possessing zero immunity against the fiercely teratogenic Schmallenberg virus. By March 2013 animals in every county of England and Wales had shown positive serology for SBV even as the Culicoides midge vector blew across the Irish Sea to infest Ireland and surmounted the vestiges of Hadrian's wall to invade southern Scotland.
And suddenly here I was amid the grey chill of a Midlands vernal equinox marvelling at the clinical acumen of my hosting veterinarian colleague Carolyn Baguley as she palpated cattle, pulled lambs and reduced a dairy cow's prolapsed uterus so massive had I encountered it on my own I might have wept openly.
Though the midges were largely absent SBV was still lurking as demonstrated in the looming antibody titres of the infected.
Then there were the calves...
The first a Holstein with hindlimb deformities born alive then humanely destroyed by the attending veterinarian black, white and hideous sprawled on the sodden ground. I had come a long way so out came the knife while Carolyn readied sample jars lung, heart, liver, spleen, mesenteric lymph node, kidney, thoracic fluid, dropped in formalin for histologic examination fresh-frozen for virus isolation. A burly terrier in police yellow investigated while I cut away, then we are off to see a calf pneumonia ministrations for the living as nothing can be done for the damage done to a calf's brain back in the waning days of summer or early autumn by a virus l'enfant terrible of a ever-changing climate.
The day rolls on Carolyn's driving along the narrow lanes sure but at times prone to steal the breath. Finally we arrive at a blue-doored farm with sheer slate roofs. From a barrel we draw forth a monster a crumpled short-horn calf showing the pathognomonic signs of the cruel virus brachygnathia, torticollis, scoliosis, arthrogryposis, the skeletal musculature that was to have exercised the foetus in-utero utterly missing a result of the ravages of SBV upon the foetal neurones.
A calamity and one doubly so by the loss of pure-bred calf compounded by the necessity and expense of a veterinarian to extract the calf-monster from the cow. We stare at the tangled sodden calf-corpse Carolyn, farmer and I, Carolyn measured, reassuring yet always the consummate professional. The farmer glances uneasily at the 35 or so cows yet in calf in the nearby pens impossible to know if they will birth healthy calves or more Schmallenberg monsters.
Thus begins an uneasy wait...
