Besides being a 12-letter word – and a hard one to spell at that – anaplasmosis is a disease the beef industry shouldn’t take lightly.

What is one thing everyone in the cattle industry works together to achieve? Disease prevention. By preventing disease, we help improve animal health and reduce antibiotic usage and consumer concerns as well as improve labor efficiencies.

As the fall season approaches, the daylight hours get shorter, the nights are cooler and, depending on the management system, cattlemen are gearing up for fall breeding or calving. Vaccination for respiratory and reproductive disease can help enhance breeding success and weaning of calves.

In just the last couple of months, while providing bovine respiratory disease information to cattlemen, I was asked questions about use of intranasal vaccines. Because there are several types of these vaccines, and because of producer interest, I’ll try to address the most appropriate uses of these vaccines to prevent disease in cattle herds.

Stress caused by this summer’s drought across much of the country means that calves born this fall may have higher susceptibility to scours.