Not a good-looking cow—which is why methods of detecting paratuberculosis early are very important.

There’s nothing like a plate of cookies hot from the oven washed down with a glass of milk. Preferably, you’ll have that milk without any Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis.  Infected cattle can remain symptom free for quite a while, so it’s important to identify infected organisms before they can pass the infection on to others in the herd.  A potential screening method involves the use of an immunolabelled magnetic bead assay.  To create a uniform bacterial suspension, the researchers broke up clumps by treatment in an ultrasonic cleaner.  The new test was found to be accurate enough to detect small numbers of the bacteria.

For further information visit www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

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