February 2023
KSVDL Bovine Abortion Results
Abortion workups can be very frustrating for diagnosticians, practitioners, and producers. Approximately 19.2% and 22.8% of the bovine submissions (total submissions = ~300 per year) resulted in a diagnosis in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
There are several reasons why a definitive diagnosis is not resulted on any given submission, including the organism is no longer present, pathogens are not involved, excessive tissue autolysis is present, and not all appropriate tissues were submitted.
Consistently through the last few years, submissions that included the placenta were four times more likely to result in a diagnosis compared to those that did not. Additionally, submissions which included histology were twice as likely to result in a definitive diagnosis.
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