We have purchased 3 sets of goats over the past 3 years, all from farms that have paperwork showing negative CAE/CL/Johnes, we have created our own herd from these goats, the buck/whether were only 6 months old when we got them so they had not been tested but all of our does had been tested negative previously.
Now that we have established our herd we decided to have the whole herd tested so we could advertise as CAE/CL/Johnes free and tested. Imagine our concern when our Buck, the sire to basically the entire herd (20+ offspring) came back at 0.91 positive for Johnes. None of our other goats tested positive, but all of them had S/P ratios from 0.05 to 0.51, the younger ones had lower ratios than the mothers but absolutely none of them came back as 0.00.
We are following up with a fecal PCR test next week to verify the results. If the buck is positive for Johnes, I can assume that all of his pen-mates have become infected by now, what about the females that visited him for a couple days to get bred 6 months ago? We kept them with him for 3 days, they would have shared his food and water.
Does anyone have any experience with Johnes ELISA testing results? Should all of the goats be 0.00 S/P indicating they have no antibodies present for the MAP bacteria? Or do the numbers always fluctuate between 0.01 and 1.00? From my reading it seems like once it's in a herd it's there for good, you can test everyone negative, but still miss active infections, you have to keep testing year after year to make sure you catch anything in the potentially active phase, but if you leave uninfected animals living with infected animals for years they will all become infected? It seems like any positive results at all indicate a much wider infection than indicated since the tests are only 20% accurate?
None of my goats present clinically with Johnes, we were just doing a base test and caught a positive. The bucks/whethers are all kept separate from the does, but since all the does have S/P ratios that are not 0.00 does that mean they are all infected just not to the point of shedding MAP in feces yet?
Now that we have established our herd we decided to have the whole herd tested so we could advertise as CAE/CL/Johnes free and tested. Imagine our concern when our Buck, the sire to basically the entire herd (20+ offspring) came back at 0.91 positive for Johnes. None of our other goats tested positive, but all of them had S/P ratios from 0.05 to 0.51, the younger ones had lower ratios than the mothers but absolutely none of them came back as 0.00.
We are following up with a fecal PCR test next week to verify the results. If the buck is positive for Johnes, I can assume that all of his pen-mates have become infected by now, what about the females that visited him for a couple days to get bred 6 months ago? We kept them with him for 3 days, they would have shared his food and water.
Does anyone have any experience with Johnes ELISA testing results? Should all of the goats be 0.00 S/P indicating they have no antibodies present for the MAP bacteria? Or do the numbers always fluctuate between 0.01 and 1.00? From my reading it seems like once it's in a herd it's there for good, you can test everyone negative, but still miss active infections, you have to keep testing year after year to make sure you catch anything in the potentially active phase, but if you leave uninfected animals living with infected animals for years they will all become infected? It seems like any positive results at all indicate a much wider infection than indicated since the tests are only 20% accurate?
None of my goats present clinically with Johnes, we were just doing a base test and caught a positive. The bucks/whethers are all kept separate from the does, but since all the does have S/P ratios that are not 0.00 does that mean they are all infected just not to the point of shedding MAP in feces yet?
