Hydrocephalus

Hydrocephalus is the reason that bovine calves are stillborn, or even live through birth only to die quickly afterwards. An overabundance of cerebral spinal fluid can cause the bovine calf’s head to be malformed and dome-shaped. There can be a birth that the bovine calf will live, but symptoms of weakness, depression, spasms, and convulsions will result from cerebral pressure on the brain’s functions. Clinical signs of droopy ears, head and even blindness will be identified along with the inability to suckle. A number of infectious diseases have been identified to cause hydrocephaly, all of which are the result of infection of the dam during days 62 – 96 of pregnancy, and consequently the improper development of the fetus (Arsdall, 2011). The exposure to Bovine Viral Diarrhea Virus, and Blue Tongue Virus, are a few of the diseases that cause the cerebral spinal fluid to produce in …show more content…
All this fluid puts pressure on the developing brain so chances of survival are slim. If the bovine calf is born alive, it should be euthanized if the disease is debilitating.
Symptoms, if not critical, can allow the bovine calf to mature to adulthood, but this is a rare instance.
Submission of fetal tissue and blood samples to a laboratory might help the owner to find out what caused this disease in the bovine calf. The dam should be vaccinated before any breeding is to take place. If a known case of hydrocephalus is between two certain breeding pair, the cow and sire should not be breed together due to the inherited genes that would pass to the fetus. There is no treatment for this disease and it is not zoonotic to