Alpacas are normally very healthy.  In the last four years we have not had any viral based diseases on this ranch.  Well, that all changed on October 19th.  A few days earlier we brought in 12 alpacas from a ranch in southern Washington.  They were kept on the south side of our property in quarantine.  Quarantine is always advised when bringing animals in from outside.  Within three days of their arrival, three of the new alpacas had come down with an upper respiratory virus.  This virus presented itself as a runny nose accompanied by a cough and a fever of 104f +/-.  The alpacas really were miserable.  One of them appeared to have some trouble breathing so we administered Naxcel for a couple of days.
 

Over the course of the next two weeks we had 24 out of 62  alpacas come down with the same thing.  It seems that this bug is spread through the air or by birds, bugs or even shoes.  Quarantine did no good.
 

Luckily, only two of them had symptoms bad enough to require an anti-biotic.  As it turns out, we were truly one of the lucky alpaca breeders.  Over the course of the last three months, 40 alpacas have died as a direct result of this virus.  There have also been hundreds of premature births resulting in death to the cria.

When we finally beat this virus we realized that even alpacas as healthy as they usually are, are not immune to a bad virus.  There are many studies being done across the country in hopes of identifying this bad bug.  Unfortunately, even if we can get some concrete answers, it’s to late for many alpacas and their owners.

We always like to include some pictures relative to the story we are telling on this blog.  In this case I think we’ll skip the pictures of snotty noses and put up some baby pictures instead. 

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