Agreement among deep nasopharyngeal sampling culture results for 3 different swab types in preweaning dairy calves

Alejandro Hoyos-Jaramillo; Adriana Garzon; Heather M Fritz; Barbara A Byrne; Craig C Miramontes; Terry W Lehenbauer; Sharif Aly; Richard V Pereira

doi:10.3168/jdsc.2023-0425

Agreement among deep nasopharyngeal sampling culture results for 3 different swab types in preweaning dairy calves

JDS Commun. 2023 Oct 16;5(1):57-60. doi: 10.3168/jdsc.2023-0425. eCollection 2024 Jan.

Authors

Alejandro Hoyos-Jaramillo¹, Adriana Garzon¹, Heather M Fritz², Barbara A Byrne³, Craig C Miramontes¹, Terry W Lehenbauer^{1

4}, Sharif Aly^{1

4}, Richard V Pereira¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA 95616.
² California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA 95616.
³ Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA 95616.
⁴ Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California-Davis, Tulare, CA 95616.

Abstract

Accurate isolation and identification of pathogens for an animal with bovine respiratory disease are of critical importance to direct appropriate decision-making related to the treatment of individual animals, as well as control and prevention options in a herd setting. The objective of this study was to compare nasopharyngeal sampling approaches to evaluate accuracy and agreement for the recovery of Mannheimia haemolytica (MH) and Pasteurella multocida (PM) from deep nasopharyngeal swabs (DNS) using 3 different swabs. Deep nasopharyngeal samples were collected from 45 dairy calves using 3 swabs: (1) double-guarded culture swab (DGS); (2) single-guarded culture swab (SGS); and (3) unguarded culture swab (UGS). To evaluate the degree of agreement between DGS, SGS, and UGS, culture results were compared for each calf sampled by using a kappa agreement test. Overall, findings from our study support that when using either SGS or DGS for DNS sampling of preweaning calves, a high agreement for recovery of PM is observed. A low recovery of MH was observed in the study, limiting the conclusion comparing the 3 DNS methods. Use of UGS is considered a potential alternative; however, a higher percentage of polymicrobial growth was found with UGS samples.