Successful treatment of mastitis depends on early detection and proper diagnosis. Once a diagnosis is made, it is essential to start on a treatment program to clear up the infection and create a cure as quickly as possible.
Sampling is Key
In order to determine what organism is causing the milk quality issue, a milk sample should be submitted for culture or PCR testing. Your veterinarian can process samples in the clinic lab or send the samples out to a third-party lab. While effective and better than no analysis at all, considerable time can elapse between identifying abnormal milk, collecting a sample, getting it to your veterinarian, submission to a lab for analysis, and finally receiving the results.
To speed up this process, many producers are opting for on-farm culturing and/or PCR testing. On-farm testing is a popular way of identifying mastitis pathogens earlier; this allows dairy producers to treat infected cows and/or change management practices in order to reduce mastitis infection rates. Not only does on-farm testing give producers the opportunity to make faster treatment decisions, it can also reduce the costs associated with milk discard and reduced animal performance.
Limit antibiotic use
The primary goal of using on-farm culturing or PCR testing is to focus the use of antibiotics to those cows who really need it. Once an animal is identified with an intramammary infection, a milk sample is taken for analysis. In the on-farm laboratory, the technician dips an inoculating loop into the sample and applies it to the surface of an agar plate. The plate is incubated and analyzed for growth after 24 hours. If no growth is observed, plates are rechecked at 48 hours. With results in hand, a decision can be made to treat the cow with a specific antibiotic, use an intramammary product focused on Gram-negative bacteria or avoid antibiotic treatment and let the cow recover on her own.
Several research studies show that on-farm culturing systems are about 80% accurate in differentiating between Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, while PCR systems can be 100% specific, as they are based upon DNA.
Culturing process evolves
The adoption of on-farm culturing has been a key part of the evolution toward greater and more innovative opportunities for producers to gather data that informs milk quality management decisions. The technology of obtaining milk quality results continues to evolve and provides producers with the opportunity to gather more accurate results in a shorter time period.
On-farm PCR testing is now available to detect the presence of specific DNA markers for pathogens like Prototheca, Mycoplasma, Strep and Staph with a diagnostic tool from Acumen Detection. The Acumen PCR system provides results in about three hours, which means a treatment decision can be made between milkings. This could potentially speed the initiation of treatment to speed recovery, limit the amount of discarded milk, and/or segregate the infected cow from the rest of the herd. These tests can also be pooled to include samples from up to five cows, thus offering additional potential cost savings.
An example of how a DNA-based on-farm PCR testing program can be initiated is to use of the Acumen PCR system in a fresh cow surveillance program. This fresh cow mastitis screening protocol could function as follows:
- Once each week, all animals fresh 4–10 days have a composite sample taken from all four quarters. A pooled sample is then created for PCR testing by taking equal amounts of the individual cows’ composite samples. Original cow samples are refrigerated in case they are needed for further testing
- The five-cow pooled samples are tested for the presence of genetic material from Mycoplasma, Prototheca, Staph aureus and/or Strep uberis species using specific Acumen reagents
- If a five-cow pooled sample tests positive for any of the pathogens, the five individual samples collected previously from each of the five cows are tested separately
- With results in hand, the producer can follow pre-determined, veterinarian-advised protocols for reducing a mastitis incidence
Options for the screening, diagnosis and treatment of intramammary infections have evolved over time to provide accurate results in a relatively short period of time. Using a well thought out program can provide dairy producers with important information in just a few short hours. This information helps producers make informed udder health management decisions and reduces the costs associated with treatments, discarded milk or lost productivity.
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