18 April 2024
Can you help? SRUC is looking for 40 dairy farmers to participate in a project looking a specific strains of STEC.
The aim of this project is to better understand whether the STEC strains found in Scottish dairy cattle are similar (or not) to those found in beef cattle, deer, sheep, and human cases. This will increase our knowledge about these bacteria and help us understand whether dairy cattle play any role in the cases of human STEC infection that are reported each year.
What will you be doing on-farm? On those farms that sign up to the project, we will carry out two main activities:
1. We will collect dung samples from the ground in the shed or field where the milking herd is kept. The number of samples depends on the number of cows in the group. For example, from a group of 50 cows, we would collect 47 samples, and from a group of 100 cows we would collect 81 samples.
2. We will ask the farm owner or manager to complete a short questionnaire about the milking herd. This will include questions such as the age at first April 17 th, 2024 Page 2 of 2 calving, the average milk yield, calving interval, over-wintering of sheep, and contract-rearing of heifers. This can be completed on paper with us on the day, or we can send it by email if the owner/manager prefers.
When will this happen and how long will it take?
We plan to visit farms on Mondays/Tuesdays between May and September 2024. The amount of time spent on a farm will depend on the number of samples we need to collect. The questionnaire is short – just one page – so we estimate that we might be on a farm for 1-2 hours, depending on sample numbers needed.
What will you do with the samples and information you collect? The samples will all be tested for STEC bacteria. First, we will look for O157 STEC specifically, and then for other STEC, which are not the O157 strain. All the O157 STEC bacteria we find, and a subset of the non-O157 STEC, will be sent away for genetic testing so that we can see if they are related to any of the strains found in beef cattle, deer, sheep, or human cases. We will use the information from the questionnaire to help guide next steps in this area of research. For example, if none of the farms that we sample from have over-wintering sheep then in future we may collect samples from farms that do have over-wintering sheep, giving us more information about types of STEC that are shared between sheep and dairy cattle.
Who will get the results of this work? The results of the project will be reported to Scottish Government, who are funding the work, together with Food Standards Scotland. When we report results, they will be combined into overall summary results, and will be anonymised. No individual farm will be identified in the results, and no location information that could identify an individual farm will be presented in the report to Scottish Government and Food Standards Scotland. All producers who volunteer for the project will receive a summary of the project findings at the end of the project, once all sampling and analysis is completed. If any individual producer would like to receive their own results, they can request this. We would then provide the results at the end of the project, once all sampling and analysis is completed.
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