And off we go. Well, folks, it's a pleasure to be here today. My name is Dr. Steve McLaughlin. I'm the president and founder of Zuku Review, and Our Topic Today is top 20 Classic NAVLE® topics for board success. We're going to cover horses, pigs and poultry here, and we're going to review a little bit about some useful study approaches to help you get a better handle on the information. OK.

So this is the breakdown for the farm animal questions on the NAVLE®. And as you can see, the majority of questions are in ruminants and horses. OK, pigs and chickens together don't count for very much. But the nice thing about these small categories, particularly chickens and some of the exotics and things like that, you don't have to know very many diseases to do well. So that's that's nice. That's on your side. A third of your NAVLE® is on horses, ruminants and horses. OK. If we include small ruminants with cattle plus horses, that's a third of your NAVLE® right there. OK, so that's worth investing some time.

Earlier, we had a question from Ivan asking about the structure of the NAVLE®. There are 300 questions that count on the day you take your test and of the 300, they break them down this way. But a big take home message about farm animals is that right there, nearly 30 percent of the questions encounter horses and cattle. And if you pick up the other farm animals, you're well over a third of the questions just in farm animals. OK, so that makes them worth a little bit of your time, right?

If you look at the NAVLE® another way, you basically need a 70 percent to pass your NAVLE®. If you get 70 percent of the 300, that count right, you're very likely to pass. OK. And this is a way to triage and just say, Wow, I guess I really want to focus on dog, cat, horse and cow. That's where you want to invest your best time. Right? If you get enough of those questions right, you're going to pass.

So this is just a brief look at what we a tZuku among ourselves as the editors have come up with what we think are some of the most important horse topics. If you got, you know, 10 equine clinicians together and ask them what they thought this list, how it looked to them, you know, they might quibble and disagree about one or two diseases. But I think most vets are going to agree that, you know, equine abortion is a worthy topic. Laminitis, for sure. You're going to see some questions on that on your NAVLE®. Strangles, we covered that a couple of weeks ago with Dr. Grenenger. OK, so if you don't know where to start, this is a reasonable place to start. OK?

But often people will ask us. They'll say, "Well are those diseases guaranteed to be on my test?" Guaranteed, no. Likely, yes. Pretty likely. OK. If you don't know where to start. Start with the big stuff. So where do all these NAVLE® diagnosis options come from? Last week we looked at this for bovine, but all the disease categories and specific conditions come from the ICVA self-assessments veterinary assessments nAVLE species and diagnosis list. And they put this out about every seven or eight years then make a new one, and it's about 30 pages of different diagnoses. This is one page of equine diagnoses. Overall, it's over a thousand conditions, right? Nobody has time to try to learn everything they need to know about a thousand conditions, right? So pick 20. Make headway there, and that's probably going to be plenty, OK?

For your interest, this this is our take on the top 10 porcine. We've already covered some of these so far. If you saw my pig talks, we covered neonatal diahhrea. We covered the mycoplasma pneumonia. TGE was part of the diahhreas. We certainly talked about classical swine fever, also known as hog cholera, in the reportables talk. So today I picked one more pig disease to cover. Leave it to you to guess what it is, when we hit it OK. But that's enough for pigs, right? There's more to study here, and that's for you to go ahead and dig on your own. But you don't need to know everything. Same thing with chickens. This is our take on what we think are 10 of the most important diseases. But if all you did was study these three, that's a pretty good start. OK.

So how the heck are you going to study all this stuff? Triage and do the big stuff first, just like we do in the clinic. How do you start that? We talked about this last week and now we're going to do it again with a couple of different topics. Literally take a sheet of paper, a half sheet of paper and write the disease name on the top and then go online to your good friend, Dr. Google, and find a good picture of that image. You are allowed copyright rules allow you to find images online and use them for your own personal use and educational purposes in your notes. What you're not allowed to do is take images you've got somewhere, put them in your notes, put them out there in public online, as if you took those pictures or you try to sell it. That's a no no. But for your personal use, you can do whatever you want with those images. So go get a good one, get two good ones, slap it in your notes, and then those three things: what is a classic case look like? What is the key tests or tests that I want to know for that disease? And how do I treat this? That's a good approach to know three big things for any disease, and then just review those notes and quiz yourself. It's the quizzing that helps the information stick.

So let's just try one. Last week you remember we did listeriosis in cattle and ruminants, small ruminants. Today, let's try Parelaphostrongylus Tenuis. P. Tenuis. This is one you think about with llamas, in small ruminants, mostly, and it's a parasite. It's a parasite of white tailed deer. And it doesn't really make the deer sick. But if it gets into the wrong host like a llama, they have neurological signs. Or if it gets into a sheep or a goat. So a classic case might be a llama or a sheep or a goats. It's got some sort of ataxia, pelvic limb lameness, they could be stiff, they could be circling. They might be lame. They could have a scoliosis where the their concave opposite on the side of the lesion. You may see paralysis and you might see sort of a waxing, waning temporary remissions. That's pretty typical. And basically, what we've got here is this parasite migrating around looking for familiar white tailed deer tissue and not finding it.

So I told you, we have some visits, so here's our first visit. This is Mr. Boo, the diabetic cat in remission. He is about sixteen years old. He's been in remission for diabetes for about three years now. And let me tell you what, he brings new meaning to the words PUPD. That litter box fills up fast. So let's get back to P. Tenuous.

Test of choice, the short answer is there's no and there's our dog, Saint, coming to say hi to the cat. Cat is his favorite chew toy. There's no ante-mortem test that's conclusive for P. Tenuis. There's no blood test you can take that will tell you, yes or no, you've got it. The best way with this diagnosis this one is clinical signs and a cereberospinal fluid tap do an analysis of the CSF. You'll be looking there for Pleo Psittacosis, elevated protein, you might see some increased eocinophils in there. You might see xanthochromia, so like the CSF fluid is yellow. You can also do histopath on necropsy of the neural tissue like the spinal cord, and you can see it there. OK. Treatment, there's no definitive treatment for this, but most clinicians use fenbendazole or ivermectin. There are problems with this condition for antihelmintic resistance, which complicates things. And even though drugs like ivermectin are not supposed to cross the blood brain blood brain barrier, it appears that with the inflammation you get with P. Tenuis, it does appear to cross into the central nervous system and help out. This may be a disease that's easier to prevent than it is to treat, although easy is a relative term. So, you know, if you have a bunch of valuable llamas, you want to have some deer proof fencing to keep the deer out. Certainly for small ruminants like sheep and goats using antihelmintics every 30 to 45 days from spring through fall is a good idea anyway, because of the problems that we worry about with things like humuncous and esteragia, some of those other gastrointestinal parasites. Little bonus fact: it's a guarded prognosis, and recumbency is a bad prognostic sign, so if they've got this and they're down, it's not good. So if you were to learn just these three key points for, say, 80 to 100 big diseases for the NAVLE®, that's a really solid foundation. Is it everything? No, but it gives you a toehold, right? It gives you something to start with. It gives you a picture in your head to which you can hang some information. If you get this stuff really solid and you know these top three things for 80 or 100 diseases, you can expand your notes. There's no problem with that. Or if you have some particular diseases that you know are big and warrant a little more. Yeah, sure. But at least get a foundation. OK.

OK, fine. I made some notes. Now what doc? Well, repetition. Review Review Review. Don't just write the notes and throw them away for six months. Review them frequently and then quiz yourself. Quizzing ourself is what's, it's the way you learn. It's been shown in studies without learning that people that practice tests outperform people that just study books and never quiz themselves. OK, this is how we learn. It's called working memory. Working memory just means by quizzing yourself, you're trying to access the information in your head over and over and over. If you don't quite have it there, you read the notes again. You firm it up and you keep doing that over time and eventually you own it. It becomes yours and you know it. Information can fade over time, which is why we review OK. But when we review stuff that we made a nice little half page of notes on with a good picture or two, it'll come back fast.

So here's a couple of quick questions about P. Tenuis. Just tell me and chat, folks your answers. What species are the aberrant hosts for Parelaphostrongylus tenuis. Yeah. Good. So llamas, of course, and who else? Yeah, small ruminants. Goats and sheep. Good. Good job.

What are five clinical signs of P. tenuis in an affected Llama? So just give me some of the signs you might see in an animal that's affected. Scoliosis away from the lesion? Good. Yep. Yep, CNS signs kind of multifocal. Remember, it's random. Like these little parasites are wandering around the spinal column and causing trouble, right? So circling, maybe. Paralysis, weakness, things like that. Good job. Yeah. Good job. Yeah, and recumbancy, bad prognosis.

What's our treatment of choice? And it suddenly goes quiet. Yeah, there's no there's no, you know, firmly established treatment of choice, but we often these days use fenbendazole or ivermectin. Right? And prevention is the thing you want to remember. Good job. Good job, everybody. Remember this kind of cuisine yourself. It may seem simplistic, but it's the quizzing, that's where the money is. That's how you get information to stick. And if you do this over and over, you'll get better. And this is the if on one hand you're doing practice tests and Zuku like two thirds of your time through the week. On the other hand, about a third of your time, you're making notes, reviewing books and quizzing yourself. And that together, that's the recipe for success. Two thirds of your time practice testing on Zuku or VetPrep, whatever you are using, and one third studying, making notes, quizzing yourself.

OK, finally, really important when we look at people who just didn't quite make it to pass their test, the BCSE or the PAVE or the NAVLE®. Over the years, a common thing, we see that all those people share is they didn't spend time at the end to re-review. But if you can manage to spend the final five to seven weeks for NAVLE®, maybe four to five weeks for BCSE or PAVE just doing practice tests with the timed clock ticking time test they call it, and spending about a third of your time re-viewing your notes and quizzing yourself that re-review, people that do that, they always do better. As you re review, as you do practice tests, remember you will miss questions and that is normal. OK? It's called practice testing because you're getting better at it. We're practicing. If you go to yoga, we call it yoga practice because you don't go to yoga to get 100 today, you go to yoga to try to improve a little bit. So the missed ones help you. The missed ones usually sting a little bit, and then you remember them better next time, and the system will recycled the missed ones back at you. OK. You do not need 100 to pass any of these tests. You basically need a C. That means you can miss plenty of questions and you'll be OK.

OK, so last week we did like a review of how to prepare. This was a short version of it, and then we covered a bunch of ruminant diseases. Now we're on kind of part three of all that. We're going to cover briefly pigs and poultry, and then we'll move on to horses today. So pigs are five percent of the NAVLE®. That's 15 questions out of the 300 account count. Poultry are six questions that count. Basically two percent of your NAVLE®. And I always like to make the joke if you'll pardon the foul pun. You can wing it on chickens, you'll probably be okay. All right. But now we're going to spend a little time practicing what I just told you on pigs and chickens. OK.

Which pig disease can cause early embryonic death, abortion and still stillbirths in pregnant sows and gilts? And it can cause neuro signs with vomiting and diarrhea in piglets. And it can cause fever, cough and pneumonia in weaning and growing in pigs. Weaning and growing pigs here. So what does is we guys thinking here? Little bit all over the map. So we've got some choices here, I see, PRRS, which is porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome. I see pseudorabies and I see, what else do we have here? Glasser's disease? Yeah. OK. Good job. What we're looking at here when we've got this, reproductive problems, respiratory problems and a whole bunch of dead piglets with neuro signs is what we're really thinking should be pseudorabies, OK? It's also called mad itch, and it's a bad disease. If I recall, this one's reportable.

What's your best treatment for pseudorabies? Let's see what chats as a chatroom says. Chatroom says no treatment, anybody else, Anybody else have any recommendations, no treatment, I see cull. OK. Here's your answer. So there's no specific treatment, so this is a little bit like P. Tenuis. But we do do things. So basically we use supportive care and antibiotics in the animals we think we can save and primarily antibiotics are there to control secondary bacterial infections. It turns out that vaccination in the face of an outbreak can decrease viral shedding and decrease clinical signs. So we do that. But yeah, it's really better just to get rid of this disease. OK. And prevention is important. Good job, everybody.

So let's talk a little bit about pseudorabies, also called mad itch used to be called a Aujeski's disease. More and more rightly, I think we're seeing the veterinary profession move away from these names for diseases that are a person's last name. They're still there, but they're becoming less common, and I'm glad about that. So basically, with pseudorabies the presentation depends on the age of the animal. If you've got a neurologic presentation in piglets less than seven days old with 100 percent mortality. Pseudo rabies is on your list. If you've got a respiratory presentation in older pigs, they're sneezing or coughing, they're just they've got high fevers. Psuedorabies is on your differential. And then on top of that, if you've got reproductive failure of some kind in pregnant sows and gills. Put all those three together now we're thinking pseudorabies. On top of that, this this organism can get into other species, including humans even.  And you get this mad maniac itching behavior change. The mad itch they talk about can get it in cows, dogs, cats, wildlife. It's not a good thing. OK. As I understand it, basically the other species are not the natural host, pigs of the natural hosts. So the rest of us are kind of dead end hosts. But it sounds like apparently you can still transmit it onto the pigs for a little while. So this is just a picture showing some mummified fetuses from a sow that had pseudorabies and aborted, so the mummified ones are the dark ones. And then these are just ones that didn't didn't survive the aborted. So the test of choice are many, and I'm not going to belabor this. And you shouldn't try to memorize it. Just notice here we've got we're all over the map with our presentation. We've got neuro signs in little little piglets and mortality. We've got respiratory disease in older pigs. I mean, there's a zillion respiratory diseases in pigs as pigs. And then we get some kind of reproductive problem in the pregnant sows and gilts. So, you know, this is basically every disease that pigs get can look like something like that. So it means is there's no single test, unfortunately, OK, and it's going to have to be worked up. But if you put the whole picture together, that's when you're starting to worry about pseudorabies. First of all, you might start with clinical signs and some necropsy. Often there might be no findings in the necropsy, but you might, if you're lucky, see small necrotic foci in the liver and the spleen and neonates. Histopath can show you some things, like a nonsuppertive meningoncephalitis. Some intronuclear inclusion bodies in the respiratory tract, and on and on. There's a lot of things you can do. This is not the sort of thing that you and I as a regular old vets are likely to diagnose. OK? But that's OK. We don't have to be experts. We just have to know enough to do OK on these national boards tests. OK. This is a photo courtesy of the Center for Food Safety and Public Health. These are little tiny focal necrotic foci on the liver of a piglet. So as you see that, that's a centimeter. These are very small. OK. This is a reportable disease. This is a this is a bad thing to get the treatment, as we already asked.

There's no specific treatment and it's fatal in neonates. But with some supportive care and antibiotics, you may be able to control secondary infections, like in the adult animals that have respiratory problems. As I mentioned before, a little bit counterintuitively, vaccination in the face of an outbreak with this modified live virus appears to decrease viral shedding in political science. OK, the prognosis is great for these young piglets, as we said higher percent mortality. It's a poor prognosis. Prognosis if it's an older pig and the older pig has other concurrent secondary infections, or the older pig has neuro signs. It's a good prognosis for most older pigs if they don't have a complicated disease and they can recover. But. And fortunately, most recovered animals become carriers, OK? And what we're seeing here in the picture, these are porcine paws postmortem lung lesions. And this is an image courtesy of the pig site. So prevention is key. Vaccination is important. Eradication and culling of positive animals is important. There's different strategies of how you would balance out how you do that, start it and monitor it. You maintain it with strict biosecurity and sanitation procedures. And that includes, you know, bringing in animals from two rabies free herds, semen, the rabies free things like that.

So. Let's quiz ourselves. Right, let's do a few questions. What are the expected clinical signs of pseudo rabies in grower finisher pigs and adults? So these are, you know, non-pregnant animals or adults or finishes that are running around, yeah, respiratory signs, you know, fever might be off feed signs of pneumonia. Right? Very good. Good. All right. What are the expected clinical signs of severe rabies in cows and wild animals? So it's not neuro neurons, the babies, it's the, well, yeah, you know, you're right, it is neuro signs, excuse me. You got the maniacal behavior, the mad itch. Good, good call. But basically, it's an intense local apparatus, the so-called marriage plus fever, respiratory distress and death. Not a good disease. Finally, what are the expected clinical signs of severe rabies in pregnant gilts and south? I think you guys know this one by now. Remember the picture, right? What we're going to see is different kinds of reproductive failure. OK, good. So reproductive loss of some kind. It could be fetal resorption if you're early in the first trimester, it can be different forms of abortion mummification that are might be born weak. Things like that.

OK, let's move on that was there was just one pig disease, and I didn't cover more because as I mentioned earlier, we covered a whole lot of pig diseases already. And so I don't want to overemphasize pigs because eventually we're going to get around to doing dogs and cats and things like that. And they deserve some some questions too, right? OK, so let's move on to a chicken disease. This is a poultry operation, has an outbreak with affected chicken showing depression, transient paralysis, atherosclerosis and a persistent neurologic disease necropsy of several dead birds shows and large peripheral nerves with loss of normal striations on the nerves, and some of the birds have distorted pupils in the eyes. So here's a picture of what that looks like. OK, so the normal eye is over here and the abnormal line is over here. OK. So it's kind of distorted. So what are we thinking here? Now, some people have put what they think the disease is in the chat box. The question, though, is what's the best way to prevent this problem? So I'm glad that you're thinking about the disease. That's good, that gets you in the ballpark. We call this a leap question, and now NAVLE® likes to do this. The NAVLE® likes to give you the presentation, they assume you can get in the ballpark with the the diagnosis or presumptive, and then they ask you something else. So what's the best way to prevent this problem? Good, good. Now, let's say you don't know what the diseases. I see a lot of people now saying vaccinate, and I would say, you know, for some of these chicken diseases or even some of the pig diseases, if you know nothing about it and you want to know how to prevent it. Probably vaccination wouldn't be a bad guess. OK, so good job. Yeah. In this case, for this disease, the correct choice to prevent it is vaccination. And what's our diagnosis, everybody? I think most you guys probably have it by now. Right. Yeah. Swollen nerves, distorted eyes, transient paralysis, all of these things point you towards Marek's disease, but see, I think a four minute that wrong, but you saw the medics come up right? Yeah, it's fair, Marek's disease. Good job.

OK, so Marek's disease. It's the classic case is going to be a down, paralyzed chicken with one leg forward. And I think I've got a nice picture here. Yeah, so that's like a classic red flag for Marek's disease. You might see this in chickens two to five months old. You might see it in turkeys raised near two chickens. It's a kind of a transient paralysis syndrome. They are depressed. They can have that distorted iris shape, which I believe, if I recall, is because of white blood cells kind of infiltrating the pupil. There are the the um, the iris, you see a color, so they twist their head in the the skin form, you can see these enlarged feather follicles sometime and you can just see decreased growth rate and decrease egg production. OK. Test of choice is basically going to be necropsy and look for enlarged large peripheral nerves. You can find a lymphoid tumors, yes, swollen sciatic. I've got a picture of that coming up. So you can see lymphoid tumors, tumors through almost any of the tissues you can name if you get that skin Lucas's version. Then if you look at the hair follicles at the base of the feathers, they're all enlarged and those ocular lesions we just saw, you know, histopath and immuno chemistry PCR. All of these things can help you with the confirmation of the diagnosis. But if you do, if you have these signs and you do a necropsy, you see enlarged peripheral nerves. You're there, OK?

So this is that picture this is comparing sciatic nerve enlargement here, where the yellow arrow is pointing and you compare that to the opposite side and I think you can see the difference, right? Prevention is a vaccination and you do it at hatching or in ova on day 18 and then let them activate. So I saw a lot of people get that in the chat. That was good. The other thing is try to buy only, you know, birds from pathogen free flocks. OK. Just some pearls of wisdom. This is a it's an oncgenic lymhotropic alpha herpesvirus, so it's a viral disease, it's highly contagious. It's ubiquitous in the environment in the way it gets in the environment is you've got these infected chicken carriers, they've got this latent infection in the T cells and they're shedding virus and they shed virus for a long time. And it comes out in the dander, in the feathers, in this square made its skin in secretions and droppings. So it's all through the litter that all those chickens are walking around in, and it lives in the litter for months. OK. Shedding is reduced by prior vaccination, but it's in the environment, so that's a problem.

So let's do some merits questions just to quiz ourselves, OK? What are four possible findings on necropsy of a chicken with Marek's disease? Just put it in chat them for tumors, very good and large, nerves good. Yeah. What are some other ones? Yeah. Ocular lesions yet to coalesce the skin lesions that we mentioned where you got the enlarged follicles, where the feathers insert. Very good. Good job, everybody. So yeah, that's your basic answer, right there. Everybody's got it. Good job. How is Marek's transmitted between birds? Dander good fomites, yup, yup. Inhalation of the dander, fecal droppings, yeah, it's in the environment, right? And who's doing it? Carrier animals. Right? So carrier animals are shedding the virus, it's that latent T cell infection. And just remember, once it gets in the environment, it's there a long time. OK.

All right, folks, that was great, you did a good job. I only did one chicken disease. There is only going to be six questions on Natalie that count. So go on your own. Pick three or four or even five at the most chicken diseases. Make some notes and give it a little tune up. OK, but that's how you play the game. And then those notes are super helpful as you go forward and you go to rereview those in the final month before your exam.