Bovine respiratory disease prevention Intervention colostrum feeding in at-risk calves reduces the risk of bovine respiratory disease (BRD)25 June 2024 25 June 2024 3 minute read 3 minute read By: By: Chris Wright North America[Excerpts of presentation by Melissa Cantor, PhD, Department of Animal Science, Penn State University, during the 2024 Tri-State Dairy Conference]Bovine respiratory disease is a challenging disease to manage in calves because the presenting signs are complex: ear tilt, cough, labored breathing, cloudy eye or nasal discharge, and elevated temperature. The majority of bovine respiratory disease cases (90%) are bacterial which supports producer usage of antimicrobials for this disease (Urie et al., 2018). Several nutraceuticals with bioactive properties have been explored to improve calf responses to diarrhea, such as lysolecithin (Reis et al., 2021), lactoferrin (Pempek et al., 2019), oligosaccharides (Reis et al., 2022), and reconstituted bovine colostrum powder (Chamorro et al., 2017; Kargar et al., 2020; McCarthy et al., 2023). For bovine respiratory disease, no positive benefits were observed in preventative colostrum feeding except for one study (Charmorro et al., 2017). For older calves at risk for bovine respiratory disease, feeding colostrum at 0.13 kg/day for 3 days ameliorated the likelihood and severity of disease (Cantor et al., 2021).