Assessing farmer willingness to participate in a subsidized veterinary herd health management program.

Zoonoses, such as COVID-19, can cause pandemics with many fatalities. Therefore, livestock keepers should attach great importance to livestock disease control. Veterinarians can support farmers in this task through a structured veterinary herd health management (VHHM) program.

Udder health, veterinary costs, and antibiotic usage in free stall compared with tie stall dairy housing systems: An optimized matching approach in Switzerland.

Observational studies are important in livestock science. As treatment is not assigned randomly in such studies, selection bias can be a problem. This is often addressed by matching methods.

[Evaluation of voluntary incentive--based animal welfare programs to decrease antimicrobial use on source dairies and veal calf fattening operations].

Increased antimicrobial use (AMU) and poor animal health are common problems on Swiss veal farms. The creation of incentive systems could contribute to reduce AMU and to implement supportive management measures. Voluntary government-funded programs could be an option.

Mutations in protocadherin 15 and cadherin 23 affect tip links and mechanotransduction in mammalian sensory hair cells.

Immunocytochemical studies have shown that protocadherin-15 (PCDH15) and cadherin-23 (CDH23) are associated with tip links, structures thought to gate the mechanotransducer channels of hair cells in the sensory epithelia of the inner ear. The present report describes functional and structural analyses of hair cells from Pcdh15(av3J) (av3J), Pcdh15(av6J) (av6J) and Cdh23(v2J) (v2J) mice. The av3J and v2J mice carry point mutations that are predicted to introduce premature stop codons in the transcripts for Pcdh15 and Cdh23, respectively, and av6J mice have an in-frame deletion predicted to remove most of the 9th cadherin ectodomain from PCDH15.

Harmonin-b, an actin-binding scaffold protein, is involved in the adaptation of mechanoelectrical transduction by sensory hair cells.

We assessed the involvement of harmonin-b, a submembranous protein containing PDZ domains, in the mechanoelectrical transduction machinery of inner ear hair cells. Harmonin-b is located in the region of the upper insertion point of the tip link that joins adjacent stereocilia from different rows and that is believed to gate transducer channel(s) located in the region of the tip link's lower insertion point. In Ush1c (dfcr-2J/dfcr-2J) mutant mice defective for harmonin-b, step deflections of the hair bundle evoked transduction currents with altered speed and extent of adaptation.