IN TWO SHAKES: Two Australian lambs, one healthy, (right) and one with the biliary atresia-like syndrome (left)STEVE WHITTAKER
In 1988, Peter Windsor, then a veterinary pathologist for the New South Wales Department of Agriculture in Australia, received a call from a field veterinarian about several hundred newborn lambs that had died on a farm in a hilly region of the state near the Burrinjuck Dam. All of the lambs had been producing white feces and died within a few weeks of being born. Windsor asked to examine some of the animals, and upon post-mortem analysis of at least a dozen, “we found they didn’t have any gall bladders and their livers were already starting to develop early signs of cirrhosis,” he says. “This was new to me.”
But the pattern wasn’t entirely new to Australian farmers. In 1964, livestock had suffered a similar ...
