Last week was a very busy week for me in the laboratory and on the farms.
Monday was spent screening faecal samples from blackface mountain ewes from county Galway. These ewes contained high amounts of both rumen and liver fluke, this is understandable as they come from a wet area which could give rise to the intermediate host, and the owners of mountain sheep would be less likely to regular dose their sheep against fluke.
Tuesday was my first day collecting samples on a farm. Michael Fagan who is the farm manager brought me two Teagasc farms Tuohy’s and Newford, Tuohy’s is a rented farm where they rear their steer (castrated) bull claves for dawn meats and Newford is where they have their suckler herd. Michael brought me out to take samples from Tuohy’s because he felt that these bullocks were not thriving as well as before Christmas and suspected a fluke infection. I collected 11 samples, six from tagged calves and five from ground samples.
After Tuohy’s we headed for Newford where I collected 18 faecal samples from cows around the farm. One cow on this farm was quite ill so samples had previously been taken from this cow and both rumen and liver fluke eggs were identified. I collected samples from this cow and 16 others in the hope of identifying rumen fluke eggs.
These 29 samples were stored in the fridge overnight. On Wednesday and Thursday, I prepared both Tuohy’s and Newford samples through the sedimentation method and the addition of the methylene blue and began to screen the slides.
On Friday I continued to screen these samples and recorded rumen fluke eggs in only one of the samples from the Tuohy farm, next week I will run PCR on all 11 samples to see if there is rumen fluke DNA in the samples. If there is RF DNA in the samples where no eggs were found, then the animal is infected with the immature stage which is causing harm to the animal but not shedding eggs.
Next week I will continue screening, running PCR and finish the corrections for my Lit review.
