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HOW TO USE 10% BUFFERED FORMALIN WITH CASEOUS LYMPHADENITIS ABSCESSES

First step is to make sure that the abscess is CL. Abscesses that are not CL should be lanced, cleaned out, and flushed with strong iodine or equivalent. Do NOT inject Formalin into them. For example, arcanobacterium pyogenes (aka trueperella pyogenes) is often the bacteria found in abscesses involving thorns or other sharp objects that have entered the goat's body. Until the object is removed from the abscess, the body will continue to produce large amounts of fluid into an increasingly larger abscess. I have seen A. pyogenes abscesses in chest walls that, when lanced, the pus filled a gallon milk jug. They must be lanced and cleaned out.

Supplies needed for using 10% buffered Formalin in a CL abscess: 3cc Luer-lock syringes, 25 gauge needles, disposable gloves, paper towels, protective eye wear, plastic disposable Wal-Mart type bags, strong iodine or equivalent in a squeeze bottle with an applicator tip, #10 disposable scalpels, container into which discarded needles can be placed, bleach, bottle of 10% buffered Formalin, small-animal portable electric clippers or hand-operated hair-cutting scissors, and a strong person to hold the goat very still.

After you have had the exudate (pus) tested and determined that the abscess contains the CL bacteria, then put your fingers around the abscess. If you can move the skin over it, the abscess is NOT ready for Formalin injection (or lancing). If you can get your fingers almost completely around the abscess and pull it away from the body, this means that the abscess is now adhered to the underside of the hide and almost always is soft enough to inject Formalin. (If the pus inside the abscess is still hard, Formalin cannot mix with it and kill the bacteria.) If you wait until the hair is completely off the abscess, the skin will be drawn too tight and thin and injecting Formalin will likely cause it to rupture. Formalin injection is most successful when the knot is soft, still has most of the hair on it, and can be pulled away from the body by wrapping your fingers around it.

NOTE: If you cannot or do not want to use Formalin, you can cross-hatch lance, clean out, and flush with strong iodine, then isolate the goat for a few days to make sure the abscess isn't dripping. You may have to go back in and clean it out a second time, repeating the procedure. If pus drops on the ground or equipment, clean it up, properly dispose of it, and pour bleach over the area affected.

Using a 3 cc Luer-lock syringe (to prevent the needle from blowing off the syringe) and a 25-gauge needle (to produce as small a hole as possible to prevent Formalin backflow), have someone hold the goat still. Think of the abscess as a clock face and inject PARALLEL TO THE BODY into the abscess at the 12 o'clock position (when the goat is on its feet) so that the Formalin is less likely to run out. Be positive that the needle is in the abscess and NOT in the goat's body. Be aware of major artery and vein locations in order to avoid them -- particularly the jugular vein in the goat's neck. While slowly pushing the syringe's plunger, move the needle inside the abscess in a windshield wiper motion to better distribute Formalin throughout the soft pus.

Start with a 3 cc syringe filled with about 1-1/2 cc's Formalin and SLOWLY fill the abscess until it is firm but not tight. Use only what is needed; do not overfill with Formalin. Overfilling the abscess can result in swelling and discomfort for the goat. Feedback that I've received from people that have injected Formalin indicates that they often use too much.

Hold a paper towel over the injection site when the needle is removed to prevent Formalin from flowing back out, like a lab technician does when drawing blood. Some goats seem to feel the flow of Formalin, possibly in the form of coldness or pressure. Mostly the goat doesn't like being held.

Confinement of the goat in your Isolation Pen is recommended until you are positive that you have the abscess sufficiently filled with Formalin. If you don't have an Isolation Pen, build one now. Every goat raiser needs one.

Sometimes abscesses occur within abscesses. Check the goat's abscesses for several days after initial injection of Formalin, feeling for soft spots. It will always feel slightly soft around the perimeter of the abscess where it meets the goat's body. Inject SMALL amounts of Formalin into any other remaining soft spots. The goal is to achieve a hard (embalmed) knot. Formalin combines with and hardens the pus quickly.

Once the abscess feels hard all over, leave it alone. Over a period of weeks, it will shrink as a hard black/grayish thick scab develops. Eventually the scab will loosen around the perimeter's edges and either fall off or will need to be gently pulled off. The hardened abscess that comes off will have dry pus inside that has been disinfected by the Formalin; dispose of it properly. Fresh pink skin will appear inside a slightly-recessed hole. Let it heal and hair grow over it. If done correctly, no visible evidence of a CL abscess will remain. Put the goat back with its herd.

If you get Formalin on your skin or in your eyes or mucous membranes, flush thoroughly with clean tap water. While applying Formalin to the hoof of a goat with hoof rot, I have gotten Formalin in my eye (under my contact lens) and it didn't sting or affect my eyesight. Formalin is odorless, colorless, and the consistency of water.

The plus side of using Formalin to manage CL abscesses is no exposure of the bacteria to either the environment or other goats, no long-term isolation of the treated animals, and less stress on the goat raiser. The negatives include concern about off-label usage, possible objection of some authorities to this application, and the fact that many goat raisers do not use the Formalin properly. NOT all abscesses are CL abscesses. Have the PUS tested.

There are articles on my website's Articles page at www.tennesseemeatgoats.com on CL and other types of abscesses, as well as a diagram of lymph gland sites in the goat's body.

You must do your own due diligence and decide which course of action to follow when dealing with Caseous Lymphadenitis. It is my opinion that unless goat breeders want to continue destroying good animals and incurring the financial losses that such decisions bring, then we all must learn how to manage Caseous Lymphadenitis if and when it appears in our herds.

Suzanne W. Gasparotto, Onion Creek Ranch, Texas 5.1.25

New World Screwworm

Ranchers plead for help to fight a devastating pest on its way back to Texas
It’s been decades since the New World Screwworm was a problem in the U.S.
By Michael Marks Texas Standard

Orininal article on the Texas Standard website (printed with permission).
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/new-world-screwworm-spread-mexico-texas-cattle/

May 12 update: U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins closed U.S. ports of entry to cattle, horses and bison from Mexico on Sunday, after reports that the New World Screwworm had been found as far north as the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz.

“This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety,” Rollins said in a statement.

The previous version of this story continues below.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a Texan, spoke to reporters in front of the White House last week about a dangerous pest on its way back to the United States.

“The New World Screwworm, the NWS for short, is a scourge that is making its way from Latin America up through Mexico,” Rollins said. “And if it hits America, it is going to be absolutely devastating to our cattle industry at the top of the list, frankly to a lot of our industries.” 

The New World Screwworm – actually a fly – was a huge problem for U.S. livestock and wildlife until it was eradicated in the 1960s, and pushed south all the way to Colombia.

Recently however, the screwworm’s steadily made its way north, back toward the United States. The U.S. needed Mexico’s help to control the screwworm, and it wasn’t getting it.

For years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has strategically dropped sterilized screwworms from airplanes to prevent their spread. Rollins said that authorities in Mexico held this up with bureaucratic delays and taxes on equipment.

“The sterile flies on the planes that we’re trying to land, that is what will push that New World Screwworm back into the south of Mexico and into southern Latin America,” Rollins said. “We were having all sorts of trouble landing those planes. They wouldn’t let us land them.”

So Rollins wrote a letter to Julio Berdegué Sacristán, Mexico’s agriculture and rural development secretary, saying that if these delays continued, the U.S. would stop accepting imports of Mexican cattle.

The impasse between the two countries broke shortly afterward. But a bigger problem remains: pushing screwworms back south again before they reach the United States.

Controlling the screwworms

Generations of American ranchers fought screwworms.

“In the past when we did have screwworms, and we’re going back to the 1960s, ’70s, I remember reading about cases in the Dakotas,” said Max Scott, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University.

Their screw-shaped larvae burrow into the sensitive spots of mammals, causing disease, infection and death.

“This is a critter that we don’t want back in the U.S.,” said David Anderson, a livestock professor and extension economist with Texas A&M University. “If you have livestock, you’re going to be out there all the time checking your animals for any wound. … I think would be a pretty devastating thing if we were to get it back.”

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A Texas entomologist named Edward Knipling was one of the researchers who made a major breakthrough in screwworm control, called the sterile insect technique.

Since female screwworms mate only once, Knipling realized he could collapse their population by releasing sterilized male screwworms. Labs in Kerrville and Mission sterilized billions of screwworms over the second half of the 20th century with nuclear radiation.

Over the decades, wave after wave of sterilized screwworms pushed the insects all the way to Panama’s border with Colombia. The barrier is maintained by a joint venture between Panama and the United States called COPEG, which conducts air-drops of sterile insects and on-the-ground inspections. It’s saved an untold number of animals’ lives, as well as billions of dollars.

“The screwworm sterile release program had been very effective for you know, 20 years – longer, maybe,” Scott said.

A renewed threat

In 2022, however, the flies broke through COPEG’s barrier and started to spread north. No one knows exactly why this happened, but the illegal movement of people and cattle, as well as regulators being stretched thin by the pandemic, likely contributed.

“The fly started to spread northward through Panama, up into Costa Rica and Central America and then, the first detection November of 2024 in Mexico,” said Jenny Lester Moffitt, who was in charge of the screwworm program at the time as USDA undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs. Moffitt was a Biden administration appointee and left the agency in January.

When USDA got word that screwworms had reached Mexico in November, they temporarily shut down cattle imports, like Rollins threatened to do last week. During that time, the agency installed inspection equipment in southern Mexico and started dropping sterile insects in the country. To keep them from reaching the U.S., Moffitt also realized that they would need more flies.

“Starting in November when we had the first detection in Mexico, realizing that we were going to need to have more flies to release, and we needed to really not just rely on the one production facility that we have in Panama,” she said.

The facility in Panama can produce 100 million sterile flies per week.

“The 100 million flies out of that Panamanian facility are not enough flies to push it back down to Colombia probably in my lifetime. It’s going to take an increased amount of flies,” said Wayne Cockrell, a rancher from College Station who chairs the cattle health committee for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

In early April, Cockrell went to Panama with a group of other Texans to see where the flies are made. He was impressed by its size, its staff, and its continuous operation.

“It was absolutely much larger than I anticipated,” Cockrell said. “They have their own water treatment facility, their own sewer treatment facility, backup power. They’re operating 24 hours a day – they can’t have a breakdown and say ‘Oh hey, they’ve ordered the part; it’s going to be here in a week.’”

Push for a US sterilized insect plant

If the plant in Panama shuts down for any length of time, Texas ranchers’ best tool to fight screwworms goes away. That’s why Cockrell is one of many in the cattle business pushing to get a sterilized insect plant built on this side of the border, as soon as possible. 

“We’re trying to put as much pressure as we can on USDA to give us a plan and give us some figures. And that’s not just cattle, that’s all across livestock. I mean this affects the grain farmer in Kansas or Nebraska just as much, because with a reduction in cattle numbers, that’s a reduction in demand for grain,” Cockrell said.

He and other members of the cattle raisers association met with Rollins in a private meeting at the Texas A&M Beef Center last week to discuss the issue. Association President Carl Ray Polk Jr. stressed the need for a new screwworm plant.

“This is not going away. You’re never going to eradicate New World Screwworm. You’re going to push it back. You’re going to put a Band-Aid on it,” Polk said. “But Texas, the United States of America, need a facility, and need a facility quick. You’re talking about 24 to 36 months.”

Polk said that Rollins was receptive to the idea of a new sterile fly facility. He has identified sites in South Texas that might be suitable.

A sterile insect plant can’t just go anywhere. It uses nuclear radiation to sterilize screwworms, which would complicate any review process. It also needs lots of water, a few hundred staffers, and a wide berth from any neighbors who might be offended by its odor (which is “the smell of death,” according to Cockrell).

U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican whose district includes much of Texas’ border with Mexico, wrote a bipartisan letter to Rollins in March urging the USDA to look into building a sterilized fly facility in the southwest.