If you have a small herd with little or no contact with outside goats, and you have never had the disease in your goats, do not vaccinate. Both the vaccine and the natural disease can cause lesions in humans, so be very cautious in handling vaccinated and affected animals. Adult goats that are infected may show no signs at all, or they may have puffy knees or various stages of crippling arthritis. Occasionally, kids will be affected by an incurable, progessive paralysis usually starting in the hind legs. The major route of transmission appears to be milk and colostrum from infected does.
Kids drink the milk which contains the virus and become infected.
On farms where the disease is a problem and goats show arthritis 1 year of age, owners are now experimenting with raising the kids on cow's colostrum or pasteurized goat colostrum, followed by cow's milk or pasteurized goat milk, because pasteurization kills the virus. While this technique results in a marked improvement in the appearance of the legs of yearlings, it cannot be counted on to eliminate the disease, since there are other possible routes of transmission. There is no vaccine and there is no cure so far.