Early pregnancy testing is regarded important for modern dairy farms. Easy, convenient and low cost rapid test kit has always been an ideal tool for farmers and vet. However, it is not so easy to find a urine pregnancy rapid test kit for cows, like what we have been using in human pregnancy testing.
Why there are fewer urine early pregnancy test kit for cows?
Unlike human, pregnant cows do not produce the hormone HCG, which makes it impossible to use a human pregnancy test kit for cow pregnancy testing. The real hormones in cow urine/blood related to pregnancy include early pregnancy factor (EPF), pregnancy associated glycoproteins (PAG), progesterone (P4), Pregnancy specific protein B (PSPB), estrone sulfate (E1S), etc. These different markers have different characteristics, which shall be treated differently while they are employed in the pregnancy testing.
In fact, up to now, commercial products have been developed for the detection of PAG, PSPB, P4, E1S, among which only PAG, and PSPB can be considered as early pregnancy testing marker. P4 and E1S, due to the limitation of concentration during pregnancy, are likely to cause higher false result when testing for pregnancy, especially, the estrone sulfate test kit, also known as ES Test, it can only detect pregnancy after 60day post AI with an accuracy of 92%, that is a false result close to 10%.
What test kit shall we use in cow early pregnancy testing?
The most popular product now is the Ringbio bovine pregnancy test kit, a PAG based test kits, which use the tail vein blood as sample, only 1 drop of blood with 2 drops of buffer, then in 15min, the result is available. If serum is used, 3 drops of serum shall be added and the result is also available in 15min. Since serum is tested without dilution, it will produce more sensitive results.
