Scrapie Updates in Goats and Sheep for 2025

Episode 151
For the Love of Goats

As goat owners, understanding diseases that can affect our herds is crucial for maintaining healthy animals and preventing the spread of illnesses. In this episode, Deborah Niemann is joined by Dr. Linda Detwiler, Staff Veterinarian on the Sheep and Goat Health Staff at the USDA APHIS Veterinary Service, to discuss scrapie, a neurological disease affecting sheep and goats.

Dr. Detwiler provides an update on the current state of scrapie in the United States, including its history, transmission, symptoms, testing methods, genetic resistance, and efforts to eradicate it.

Transcript – Scrapie Updates for 2025

Introduction 00:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

Deborah 00:17
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. If you’ve been around for a while, you may have seen the title of this episode and said, “Hey, you’ve done scrapie already.” But that was several years ago with Dr. Chuck Gaiser at the USDA, and things have changed. And so when I was at the American Dairy Goat Association conference in the fall, I got to hear Dr. Linda Detweiler, the staff veterinarian on the sheep and goat health staff at the USDA APHIS Veterinary Service, and she talked about the current state of scrapie in the United States. And so I thought it would be great to have her on the show to give us all an update. Welcome to the show today, Dr. Detwiler.

Dr. Detwiler 00:58
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to bring everybody up to speed.

Deborah 01:02
Yeah. So, first of all, I want to cover everything in this because I know not everybody was around several years ago to hear Dr. Gaiser’s talk. So let’s just start with the basics, and like, what is scrapie and why do we care about it?

Dr. Detwiler 01:17
So scrapie is a neurologic disease that affects sheep and goats. It’s a very long incubation. So I know most diseases–or a lot of diseases, I should say–you know when an animal or person gets infected, and then within a couple of days or weeks or months, then you see the clinical signs. And scrapie is in the disease–it’s classified either as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy or a prion disease, and we can explain that more.

But these diseases as a family have these long incubations, and usually they’re years. Like, for example, scrapie with sheep and goats, the animal may become infected with the agent, but you won’t see signs for two to five years or even longer. So again, the animal is infected, it might be spreading the disease to other animals and you won’t know it. And the primary way that we can tell is by the clinical signs, but also by taking samples. And again, it affects the brain and the spinal cord primarily.

Deborah 02:21
Okay. Now, when some people heard prion disease, they might have been like, Oh, you mean, like, mad cow or chronic wasting? And so how is it–obviously similar because it is prion disease–but also, how is it different from those?

Dr. Detweiler 02:36
Yeah, so it is in the family. So they’re in the same family as chronic wasting disease of deer and elk and of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, of cattle. So they have the similar characteristics where they affect the brain. They cause these lesions in the brain, like they call vacuoles, etc. So they’re like holes, but you can’t see them with your eyes. And so they have the similarities, but then they have differences.

So for example, mad cow disease, or BSE as we call it, it was really transmitted by the feeding of infected cattle back to cattle. It was included in the meat and bone meal and fed, and it did not spread from animal to animal. And that’s unlike scrapie and chronic wasting disease. So there are certain characteristics that are the same and others that are different. And they’re in each of those diseases–and that’s how they got put in the family of the prion diseases–there’s a form of protein, so prion protein. Now we all, including humans, have a normal form of the prion protein in our body, as do, you know, cattle and sheep and goats and the deer and the elk, etc.

And then there’s something, and we don’t quite understand the mechanism that makes that normal protein change shapes. And when it changes shapes, it becomes–we call it an abnormal protein. And that starts to cause the lesions when it accumulates in the brain and the spinal cord. It starts to cause the lesions and the deterioration in the brain, and then eventually will lead to the clinical signs as it accumulates, as it goes.

And again, the mechanism on why it does that is not fully understood today. But that’s the commonality, because that happens in cattle with BSC, with the chronic wasting disease of deer and elk, etc, and people. There’s a human disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and then Kuru, some people might have heard of that. That was in the Papua New Guinea natives, and their practice of eating their ancestors. For example, cannibalism seemed to perpetuate that disease that’s similar to BSE in cattle.

Deborah 04:54
Okay, and why is it important for goat and sheep breeders to understand scrapie?

Dr. Detwiler 05:00
Well, it’s important to understand the disease. It was introduced into the United States in 1947,
probably from imported animals that came in from the United Kingdom and then through Canada and into the United States. And unfortunately, there was no action taken until 1952. And because the disease is not always apparent for all these years, right, that during the incubation period, it was spreading kind of silently. And by allowing it to really grab hold in the United States, and then we just played catch up. And at that point in time, we did not have a lot of the tools that we have now in order to bring it under control.

The reason it’s important for sheep and goat producers now to understand is that we are close to, hopefully, eliminating the disease from the country. We’ve not had a case since January of 2021. By international standards, we are required to go seven years without a case, and we have an active surveillance program. So as of the end of January, we have three more years, and if we don’t have a case then, the United States could send in a dossier for a declaration for scrapie freedom. And so it’s important for the producers to understand about the disease so that if there are any lasting, you know, any last cases, to find them and find them early, so that we can deal with them.

Deborah 06:33
Right. And a couple weeks ago, we talked to some breeders from Australia who’ve been importing goats for, well, not goats–Australia is scrapie free, and so they cannot import goats from the US. And so they talked about what an ordeal it is to get US genetics into their country. And it is quite an ordeal.

Dr. Detwiler 06:59
Because they–Australia, New Zealand–they also imported sheep back in those–the 40s and 50s, kind of like the US and Canada did. But when they did realize that they imported it, they had cases, they jumped on it with two feet. I guess that’s the best way to say it. And they eliminated those sheep, anything that came in. So they did this really extensive eradication effort early on in there. So it appears that they were very successful in eliminating. So those are the two countries now in the world that are recognized internationally by the World Organization for Animal Health as being scrapie free.

Deborah 07:38
Yeah, that’s pretty amazing to think that there’s only two countries in the world that have that designation. And so it makes it tough for Americans to sell sheep and goats to other countries.

Dr. Detwiler 07:50
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It does impact. And other countries would like our genetics, they would like our sheep and goat genetics and live animals from the US.

Deborah 08:01
Yeah. So you mentioned that it is transmissible among animals, unlike mad cow disease. How exactly is it transmitted?

Dr. Detwiler 08:11
So in a sheep and goat, they most likely take it in by the oral well. So the agent is in the environment, but it’s shed from other sheep and goats, okay. And it’s ingested, alright. It can be in the milk, it can be in colostrum, it can be in placenta and the fluids, the birth fluids. So usually young lambs, if they’re exposed to those and they ingest those tissues or fluids, then the agent goes into the intestine. The same mechanism, maybe colostrum, the gut is open for colostrum antibodies to go through. And that’s what appears that maybe that happens in in kids and lambs, etc. And then the agent gets in the body, and once it’s in the body, during that long incubation period, during the years, it replicates, and it just reproduces itself, right.

It seems like there’s a template where it takes the normal protein somehow, you know the abnormal causes a configuration. So it replicates in the body and goes throughout. It’s in a lot of the lymphoid tissue, lymph nodes. Goes in the spleen. It goes in the peripheral nerves. It goes up to the spinal cord, and eventually, during that time, makes its way to the brain. I tell veterinary students when I give lectures in veterinary schools that it’s in sheep and goats, it’s in everything. Well, I’ll use sheep as the analogy, it’s in everything but the baaa pretty much. I mean, it’s really wide, widespread. And so it goes into the tissues, like the colostrum, like the milk, the placenta, as they’re incubating it, even though they don’t have signs, then they’re shedding that into the environment.

Then the other kind of unique thing about these diseases, that prion, that agent, lasts in the environment for years. I mean, there’s been studies that have shown and have buried tissue with it and then dug it up two years later and it’s still infectious. It’s been in formalin, and I think there’s one study for a decade. They take it out of the formalin, and it’s still infectious. So it’s very, very resistant to inactivation.

But I mean, it’s not–again this is what I tell vets–it’s not kryptonite. So anybody that knows the Superman story, right? It’s not kryptonite. So there are things like really high concentrations of bleach, you know, chlorine, and then sodium hydroxide, really high concentration and boiling. So if you boil it in lye, that’s the way. Everything that it requires for inactivation is pretty caustic.

And heating, because some people say, like, what about mad cow disease? That there was a contamination of meat, right? So that was the difference with mad cow disease, with BSC, that that was the one prion disease that was shown then to cross into humans. You know, we have a lot of evidence with scrapie–over 300 years–that there’s no evidence that it causes any disease in humans, unlike mad cow, unlike BSE. You can’t cook it away either. I mean, we’re talking hundreds of degrees temperature, it can survive.

Deborah 11:17
Right. Yeah. So what are the typical symptoms that someone would see if they’ve got a goat or sheep that has scrapie?

Dr. Detwiler 11:26
So usually it starts a lot of times–I started in the 1980s in Ohio. We had the dubious honor of the highest number of scrapie cases in the country. So I’m dating myself. You can see by the wrinkles right on my face. But we would normally see where a behavior changed. And owners, if they really knew their animals well, would a lot of times recognize it even before we would on those really early cases, or would know something was up. So they may separate themselves from the herd or the flock. You know, they might become either more anxious or more aggressive. I don’t like to say aggressive too much, but they did have some kind of temperament change on there.

And then, as the disease progressed, you would see tremor, like a person with Parkinson’s, like a fine shaking, especially the head and neck. They would become more excitable, either by a loud noise or sudden movement. We call that the scientific word is hyperesthesia. Then eventually it would affect how they move, their gait, and so they sometimes would have a high step or a hopping the gate. You know, the back legs would hop. Sometimes they had the itching, which we call pruritus. And like sheep would rub and rub on their wool against fence posts, etc. Sometimes it was so severe. I saw one ewe, she had no wool. She rubbed so much, in fact, she made herself bleed.

Goats a lot of times, if they have the itching they would scratch, you know, with their hind leg. They would, they scratch themselves or rub up, like on a post, you know, itching. You may or may not see the pruritus, but when you did, it was usually pretty significant. Then what would happen to the animal, they would become so what they call ataxic, or incoordinated, they would eventually become recumbent and then couldn’t get up and die. There’s no known treatment, or no known vaccine, for the disease so it really progresses until death.

Deborah 13:36
Okay. And so if someone suspects that their animal has scrapie, what kind of testing methods are available to detect it?

Dr. Detwiler 13:44
The definitive way to test is to take a sample of the brain and the lymph node with the lymph node that’s in the neck; it’s called retropharyngeal lymph node. And the area of the brain is in the brain stem; it’s called the obex. And some people might hear, if you have veterinarians that come out, or you hear about the slaughter surveillance, and submit those to the lab, and that they would look at those by our main method we use in the United States is immunohistochemistry.

And you would take a section of that, and that would stain, and you would get rid of the normal prion protein and look for the abnormal prion protein the staining in the brain. Now, there are some other tests. So, if the tissue was autolyzed, like it was out in the sun too long, or it got frozen, and sometimes you couldn’t do that immunohistochemistry test, we also have a Western blot test. That’s another alternative for us.

When I first started, just to give you an example, we were so limited. We had what they call histopathology, where we would have to look at the brain under a microscope and look for those changes, like the vacuoles in the brain, and other like just the physical changes in the brain, you know, under the microscope. And our only other test that we had–that if the brain had been, you know, decayed, autolyzed, decayed or frozen, we would have to put it in mice and wait two years to see if the mice came down with the disease. That was so disheartening. We had to tell farmers, you know, producers, owners, that we’ll tell you in two years if the animal had scrapie.

So I’ve seen so many changes in progress through the program throughout the years. It’s phenomenal in my career.

Deborah 15:30
Yeah, that’s awesome. What kind of testing can be done on live animals today?

Dr. Detwiler 15:35
So we have tests for live animals. The rectal biopsy. There’s also the third eyelid. You can do a biopsy there. So, what we’re looking for on those live animal tests is pieces of lymphoid tissue. Because remember, I was telling you that when the agent replicates and when it reproduces, it accumulates in the follicles of lymphoid tissue. And we were looking, scientists looked for where are some of the lymphoid tissue that can be accessed, you know, without doing surgery or that kind of stuff?

So they knew in the third eyelid. So in the animals, if you look at your animal, you pull the eyelid down, there’s that other eyelid there. Like if your dog, or you look in your sheep, there is. And so if you pull that out underneath, there’s a patch of lymphoid tissue. And then
there’s also lymphoid tissue in around the rectum, where the hairless areas right inside the mucosa, the tissue right inside past the hairless band. And so that also has a lot of lymphoid tissue, and we can do a biopsy there.

And as everyone might imagine, sheep or goats don’t like you messing with their eyes, right? So the rectal biopsy is much easier for us to do, and there’s much more lymphoid tissue there, or because it’s the whole band around, and so we can do a biopsy with the rectal tissue.

So the thing with the diagnostics in all these tissues, because of the way the disease progresses, if we don’t find it, it doesn’t mean the animal wasn’t infected, especially if we’re testing animals without clinical signs. So if we’re doing the live animal testing in an animal, just to see, you know, if there was exposure and it’s negative, it may mean, it may have different meanings. It may mean that the disease hasn’t progressed far enough to have the accumulation of the prion protein in there. Or, like in sheep, there’s some of the genetic–some of the sheep that are certain genetics–they don’t put the prion protein in the peripheral tissues other than in the brain. So there’s reasons why there might be a negative test.

So if you’re going to do live animal tests, it might be good for a flock or herd on that basis, but it’s individual animal, unless they’re clinically ill. It may not be the best if it’s negative. If it’s positive, we’re good. If it’s negative, you might have to do, especially in goats, where we find that the test in goats is less sensitive than it is in sheep. But if we do serial testing, it helps increase the sensitivity.

Deborah 18:13
Does genetic resistance play a role in goats?

Dr. Detwiler 18:17
I’m going to start with sheep first, because genetics was first determined that sheep had the certain susceptibility and resistance based on genetics. Back in the early 1990s, okay–and actually, that work was done in the United States. And it was good. It was, I don’t want to put in a plug for the cooperation between the government producers and the actual scientific researchers, because in the 1980s and 1990s when we knew so little, like I was explaining about the diagnostics, a number of owners, especially of sheep, at that time we had so many cases in sheep, they they allowed us to use their animals that were sacrificed for certain research projects. And it was because of those producers that we were able to really get a lot of information, and genetics was one. I took a lot of samples in Ohio, where I was, from infected flocks. And these were sent to a lab in San Francisco, and it was discovered about the prion protein gene and the genetics. So in sheep, you know the 136 and 171 that the sheep producers, they know those codons, and at 171 there’s an arginine, it’s RR sheep, or arginine homozygous, as it’s called, and those are pretty much resistant to scrapie, and that’s also helped us, you know, bring the disease under control.

So that work was done earlier with sheep, and then more recently, there’s been work that’s done with goats, and it’s found that with goats, there are actually two codons that play a role. So in goats, there are a lot of these changes in goats, but in the US, so I’ll talk in the US, right. There are two codons that play more roles and one is 146 and one is 222. These are the codons. And so at that 146, you can have either an aspartic acid, so a D, okay, or S, and that’s called serine, that’s the amino acid, and they’re less susceptible if you have those genetics on those.

In 222, codon 222, you have lysine, which is K. So if you see those tests K, those are less susceptible, or likely there could be resistant. And then if you have Q, which is glutamine, they’re more susceptible, okay. So the ones that we like to look for in the goats are K at 222. So the lysine at 222 or the aspartic acid, which is D at 146 or S at 146. So those would be the ones that would be more promising for genetic control in goats.

Deborah 21:12
Okay. And then what are the challenges of eradicating the last few cases of scrapie in the US? Because I know we’ve gone three years without a case already, and then we all got our hopes up. And so here we are again. And so what’s the challenge of eradicating those last few?

Dr. Detwiler 21:32
Yeah, it’s like any disease, when you get to the end, how do you know you get the last one, right? That’s the key. It’s like the needle in the haystack type of thing, but with a long incubation period disease, especially one where you don’t see clinical signs right away, it’s even more of a challenge, right? And so that’s the real challenge is really knowing how much you’re testing and have you found that last case? Was the January 2021 case really the last case in the US?

And that’s because of the incubation period. That’s why the international standards are going seven years. So you have to go seven years without finding a case, because that’s an extended incubation time. And so in order to send in the dossier or application for freedom, we have to show that we’ve tested enough animals, you know, in the US, you know that would be significant–that our testing has covered the populations. So we couldn’t just all go to one state that had a lot of sheep or a lot of goats and test all the animals there. We have to show that our surveillance has been spread out over the US, and it’s covered goats and covered sheep. And we’ve looked at all the things and also that the producers that we’ve tested are suspects, animals that have signs that look like scrapie. So that’s the challenge is to make sure we’ve tested enough so that we can feel confident.

Deborah 22:57
Yeah, and what some people have done waiting for this is that they’ve gotten their flock or herd certified free of scrapie, which is a seven year process. And I’ve thought about it multiple times, because I have gotten requests from people who want to buy my goats from other countries. And I have to say, “No, I can’t legally, like, it’s impossible.” So I was one of those people who’s really excited when I heard like, oh, we went three years without a case. I’m glad I didn’t bother to, you know, go to all that trouble, and then they found another one.

So just in case somebody’s not feeling as optimistic as I am, and really would like to be guaranteed that they’re going to be able to export animals at least within seven years–because we’ve got a couple different kinds of scrapie certification programs in the country, can you just explain the difference between the two?

Dr. Detwiler 23:50
Sure. So we have basically what we call the Select program in the program, and then we have the Export program. And the Select is basically just a really basic monitoring program. It requires some basic records and ID, you know if you’re moving animals off the premises, but the amount of surveillance required for the Select is really minimal, and it’s based on how many animals you have. So, for example, if you have over 100 animals, you have to have one submitted, a test eligible, one every year. If you have 26 to 100 then it’s one every two years. And if you have 25 or less, it’s just one test eligible every three years. So it’s really just a basic monitoring with the ID, you know. Some people just want to do it, because it’s another way for us to monitor and get samples in from flocks.

The ones that you’re talking about, that other countries would recognize, right, internationally is what we call our Export categories. And in our Export categories, there’s the Export Monitored or the Export Certified, and you have to be in the Export Monitored for the seven years before you get certified. I mean, there’s other ways to get there. Like if you bought–I’m actually certified. So my sheep flock is in the program, okay. It’s been in the program since 1992 when we first started the program, but I bought it from somebody else. But if you buy the whole flock intact, or you buy animals from it, you can get certified as long as you don’t have any other animals of the different status. So the certified is the one and that’s more intense, you know, than the Monitored.

And certified, not only do you have to keep the records, you have to identify your sheep, etc, but anything that would die of a test-eligible age, an adult age or so, has to be sampled. And that’s where it gets more–it’s harder for producers. You have to be able to find the animal in time, especially the flocks that have larger numbers of animals, so that if it dies out there, to get the sample taken, and you have to be able to get the sample taken and submitted to the lab. And that’s a must on those, to be able to get those samples collected and sent in for scrapie testing. So that’s where it becomes, it’s a little bit more challenging there. So, and I know, because there have been times where I’ve been away and had to make provisions. I can’t get my family, they’re not real keen on cutting off a prize ewe’s head, you know, to do that. So I have to get somebody else to come or have them do something else.

And I’ll just go back a little bit to tell you why. I mean, now the program is used for people that want to trade, but when it was first brought into play was in the early 1990s, and it was because at that point we didn’t have live animal testing. And what was very disturbing and very kind of challenging for people is, let’s say I had scrapie, and I depopulated my flock and I cleaned up and I wanted to still have sheep. And it was where it was hard. Where do I go?

I had a producer I worked with once that got it three different times, cleaned it up and bought it. And one time, the last time, they actually went to a university, thinking, Okay, this is a good source. And don’t you know, they brought it in. Within a year there were cases of scrapie, and then the university did say, Oh yeah, we have scrapie on there. So very disheartening for the producer. So we put this program into place as a source, right, for other producers to go, that you would monitor, and then they would have a source to go. So that was the original intent of the program.

Deborah 27:57
Wow, I’ve always heard that said that a lot of your medical problems are bought and sold, and that really exemplifies that little ditty very well.

So if you’ve got a case, you obviously want to know where it came from. How exactly–it seems like it could be difficult to trace positive cases back to the source. What is the challenge with that? How do they manage that?

Dr. Detwiler 28:27
Yeah, so the challenge is, as you can imagine, that because of the incubation period, right? So let’s say an animal was infected as a lamb, right? And then didn’t show signs until, like, the average is three to four years. It can be longer, but let’s say a three and a half year old animal. So you find it at that age, and then you go back to you know, either if the owner called you that had the animal, or a lot of them we do a slaughter surveillance and that’s an important part. Maybe we can talk about that coming up. But if we find it at slaughter, okay, we have the ID that’s found at slaughter, and if it has a tag on it, we have the records. It’s in a database, usually, on where the records came from. And we go back, and if it’s back to an auction, then we go back to the auction and look at the records.

Or sometimes it’s got the flock tag on it. And we’ll actually go back to a flock. We go back to the flock, and the animal was born there. Then we have a pretty good indication, you know unless it moved someplace else and came back, that that might be the place where it got infected. But where there’s a challenge is, let’s say that the animal came from one flock, but then they got it from an unknown source. Or if they know where the source was good, we go back to that source, and we’re good to go with the tracing. But where it gets really sticky, and where it gets more difficult, is where we can’t go back to really the flock of birth or the actual origin flock of the animal, and that’s important with scrapie.

Deborah 30:03
Yeah, so you mentioned the slaughter surveillance program. How does that–what kind of a role do they play?

Dr. Detwiler 30:10
So that’s been extremely beneficial for us in this whole work to eliminate scrapie. Before we had to rely on people reporting the disease, which has its, you know, pros and cons. One, as long as people know what to report, okay, then they are. But a lot of times you have new producers. And sometimes in my career in Ohio, you had people that started flocks, either 4-H flocks, etc, and they didn’t know a lot about scrapie or even other sheep and goat diseases, right? And so they didn’t even know what the disease was.

I had my very first flock, they had nothing alive between two and four years of age–nothing, okay, and it was all scrapie. And they kept thinking they had a pregnancy toxemia, and they did so much on their rations. And because the signs really get worse, like any time of stress, so lambing/kidding is usually when you see the worst signs. So again, the sheep goes down during lambing or close to lambing, and that’s one of the obvious differentials, right? So they kept thinking they had pregnancy toxemia. And finally, they called a number of different people, and one of the folks they called said, “We think you got a worse problem than that.”And so they called us, and we went out, and sure enough, they had one that had signs at the time. And I took samples, and it was scrapie in there.

So, again, so in order to report, you have to know what to look for, what to report. So that’s important. So that was the way we used to do it, before the slaughter surveillance. So the slaughter surveillance, when we got the diagnostics where we could do it, and especially in the lymph nodes, and we found a way to take the part of the brain out without cutting the head open, which would be really hard to do in a slaughterhouse floor. We take a tool and we just go in through the opening. It’s called the foramen magnum where the spinal cord goes in, we have a little tool, and we can take out that area of the brain. We take out the lymph node, goes in formalin, and it goes to our lab. So that’s basically the slaughter surveillance. And we do it on the adult animals, sheep and goats, that go to slaughter.

When that really started that in 2003, and just to give you an idea of how far we’ve come since in that time, between 2002 and 2003 when we first started, one out of 379 samples we tested were positives–so one out of 379. Since our last case, we’ve tested over 70,000 and have not found one. So one in 70,000. So again, since the time we started, we’ve tested 765,000 plus samples at slaughter, so that’s a big part. And on-farm, you know, on any kind of suspect, we’ve tested 59,000 in that timeframe. So that’ll give you an idea of the extent of that slaughter. And again, the slaughter surveillance doesn’t rely on somebody knowing what to report. It doesn’t rely on somebody being afraid to report. You know, we can just take those samples at slaughter, which has been really helpful.

Deborah 33:27
Yeah. What role does official ID play in controlling and eradicating scrapie?

Dr. Detwiler 33:35
Yeah, so official ID, it’s like any disease, right? You have to have a traceability and to know. So identification, like I said, if you find an animal at slaughter, you know, a sample a slaughter, we do take the ear tag to, you know, if we have one. And then we have that ear tag, and we’ll go back in the records and trace it back to the flock–flock or herd–where it came from. We had one we found in New Jersey a number of years ago. Now, I think, 2018, and it traced back to a herd. It was a goat in Pennsylvania. So we trace back. So the ID is really, really important for traceability.

The other thing is that the ID is very useful for–so let’s say we had a case of scrapie in somebody’s flock or herd, and then we say, Okay, well, that animal was born there, right? And it most likely got infected by other animals shedding the agent, the prion, in the environment. So we would look through their records, and we would look to all those animals that were exposed at that time, that were born at that time, and then we would take that and take the records and look at the ID and where they sold those, and trace those out. So that’s really important as well, to be able to trace out and to really identify all the animals that were exposed, and also notify other people so that we may be able to limit the amount of spread.

That was also really crucial for us too when I was in Ohio, especially in 4-H, you know. We found an infected flock, and we could get to the flocks that bought animals from there before those animals lambed in the flock. Because, remember, I was telling you, this spread is really during lambing and the milk, etc. So if we could take those animals out, like they bought ewes, and we could remove them before they lambed, a lot of times we could prevent its spreading in now a new flock.

Deborah 35:33
Okay, and are–is the USDA accepting microchips now as an official ID?

Dr. Detwiler 35:38
Yes, there are some provisions that have to go, but they are accepting. There’s certain microchips that are approved. They just have to be tattooed in order to identify where the microchip is placed.

Deborah 35:55
And then I know when I talked to Dr. Gaiser a few years ago, he said that funding has been one of the things that’s impacted efforts. Is that still an issue? Or not so much since we’re so close or…?

Dr. Detwiler 36:09
We’ve been able to kind of, you know, make do. Our biggest challenge now is the pull on our folks with the bird flu, avian influenza, right. The amount being pulled for deployments in other states, and to make sure we have coverage for especially the slaughter surveillance, et cetera, in order to do that. So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. I think the concern is going over these next couple years to maintain funding right. Since we’re so close, it would be a shame to not be able to finish. I mean, like I said, we’ll have four years under our belt. I think it’s January 28th of this year, right? So we have to go to 28 of 2028.

Deborah 36:55
Well, I’m hopeful.

Dr. Detwiler 36:57
Us too.

Deborah 36:58
Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else that people need to know about scrapie before we wrap up today?

Dr. Detwiler 37:04
No, but just if they, if they have any questions, I mean, we work with people with identification, etc. We’re always willing to, you know–our staff, our field staff–to answer questions about the program, and we are really pushing for the export, as you mentioned. We’re trying to work with the international, the World Organization for Animal Health, to really maybe allowing certain genetics, both for sheep and goats. You could export on genetics, or even some of the live animal testing, or combination.

So we’re trying to open up markets that way, by getting different, maybe requirements before we get freedom. So that’s what we’re trying to do. And we are starting to see some countries now to accept some of our animals based on genetics or, you know, different testing as we go down the road. So I think that’s important.

One other thing that’s important, I think for both goat and sheep producers with identification, we also have the threat of other diseases, right? And even for the other diseases, the traceability is important. Okay, so you see, with the avian influenza, the spill over into cattle has been a big issue. Still, the birds. So you never know what disease may pop up, you know, or be introduced, or you have a virus change, and then you have to be able to trace and find it, you know? And I think that’s another important thing for the industry.

Deborah 38:36
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really educational, and thanks for the update. And maybe in a few years, you’ll come back and say, “Yay, we’re free!”

Dr. Detwiler 38:47
Oh, I’d love to! Are you kidding? Even when I first started, I used to say, I hope we find it–even a better test before I retire or die. I even used the word “die” at that time, when I used to lecture. And now I’m like, I can’t believe it. I’m close to the end of my career, but I’m like, Oh my gosh, I might actually live to retire to see this, you know. So it’s very, very exciting. But again, it really was a cooperative effort with the industry and the government.

Deborah 39:18
Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

Dr. Detwiler 39:19
You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Deborah 39:22
And that’s it for today’s show. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to hit the “subscribe” button so that you don’t miss any episodes. To see show notes, you can always visit ForTheLoveOfGoats.com and you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/LoveGoatsPodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now!

Curious about apps and technologies related to microchips and how they can make your record keeping easier? Check out podcast episode 52, Microchipping Goats where I interviewed Allysse Sorenson, Chief Executive Herder of The Munch Bunch and webmaster at HireGoats.com.

• Main USDA Sheep and Goat Webpage: USDA APHIS | Sheep and Goat Health
• National Scrapie Eradication Program (NSEP) Webpage: USDA APHIS | National Scrapie Eradication Program
• NSEP Standards: Microsoft Word – nsep_program_standards 2019 final.doc (usda.gov)
• Designated scrapie epidemiologists in each state for questions on scrapie: Official Designated Scrapie Epidemiologists and Local Points of Contact List (usda.gov)
• SFCP Webpage: USDA APHIS | Free Flock Certification Program
• SFCP Standards: standards_current.pdf (usda.gov)