She said the team has developing the vaccine for five years. The OSU procedure is unique. An older vaccine was developed from cells in cattle and could cause anemia in calves born to immunized cows. The organism that produces the new vaccine is grown in tick cell cultures and is believed to be safer. She said friends in South Africa succeeded in using the procedure to develop a vaccine for another cattle disease.
Manufacturers quit producing anaplasmosis vaccine last year.
Anaplasmosis hit the Stillwater area extremely hard last spring, she said, and caused sales of an antibiotic used to fight the disease to increase by 300 percent at the local feed mill. Federal guidelines have made it almost impossible for producers to use an alternative treatment of mixing an antibiotic solution into feeds, Healey said. Edmour Blouin worked with Ulrike Munderloh and Timothy Kurtti, both with the University of Minnesota , to develop the vaccine. One key to their success is the use of ticks from the OSU entomology department's tick-rearing facility. Tick cells have about 1,000 times more of the infective organism than cow cells and don't cause the contamination that can occur with mammal cells.