02/22/07 Blood will tell

Blood Will Tell Recently I have been reading about an innovative cattle management tool. I'm Jeff Keane; I'll be back in one minute with details and comments. Dr. Garth Sasser, professor emeritus at the University of Idaho has given the beef and dairy industry a new management tool. BioPRYN, a pregnancy detection blood test, developed in 1995 is getting the recognition it deserves as a flexible and convenient method to increase herd reproductive efficiency. I had a telephone conversation with Dr. Sasser, took my kidding about being a WSU graduate, and learned the basics of this pregnancy test. A two milliliter volume of blood drawn at the underside base of a cow's tail, shipped to a lab in a red-topped vacuum tube will provide a 97 percent accurate pregnancy report 27 hours after initial lab set-up. The test is based on the presence or absence of a protein in the cow's blood that is only produced by a placenta. The procedure can be implemented 30 days after breeding and 90 days after the birth of the cow's last calf. Thirteen affiliate local veterinarian labs in the U.S., Canada and one in Budapest, Hungary can run the same test as the lab in Moscow, Idaho. In 2005, these labs ran 85,000 samples. 2006 saw the samples increase to over 207,000 with 87000 of those processed in the Moscow lab. Tomorrow, I'll tell you what producers think about the procedure and what we might see in the future from the practical work of Dr. Sasser. I'm Jeff Keane.