Clinical Mastitis Treatment Decisions

This episode of Have You Herd? is sponsored by Elanco Animal Health, manufacturers of Scour Bos. Few diseases can devastate a herd like scours. That’s why preparing passive immunity protection for day one is critical to helping your calves reach their full potential without disruption. Scour Bos provides comprehensive protection against up to nine antigens for broad-spectrum coverage against the leading causes of scours. Plus, with the most flexible administration schedule on the market, you have up to four months pre-calving to integrate Scour Bos into your herd health protocol.  Learn more about Scour Bos and incorporating it into your vaccine protocols by visiting this link.  

AABP Executive Director Dr. Fred Gingrich is joined by the chair of the AABP Milk Quality and Udder Health Committee, Dr. Pamela Ruegg  to discuss how veterinarians can work with farmers to develop, implement and monitor protocols for treating clinical mastitis. Ruegg discusses that clinical mastitis is the number one disease affecting dairy cows (28%) followed by lameness (12%). Clinical mastitis treatment protocols are very important when evaluating overall antimicrobial stewardship on a dairy farm since 65-85% of all doses of antimicrobials used on dairies is for mastitis. Ruegg reviews the steps for implementing a culture-based treatment protocol on dairy farms such as having a case severity recording system,  somatic cell count data, training employees, and the ability to report culture results within 24 hours. When implementing a culture-based treatment protocol, Ruegg states that about 40% of cases will be culture negative and 20-30% gram negative which helps to decrease antimicrobial treatment of cases by only treating gram positive cases. Severity scoring is important because about 50% of cases will have abnormal milk only, 35-40% will have abnormal milk and moderate signs, and less than 15% should be sick. Training workers to review the cow’s medical history before grabbing a tube to determine if the cow is eligible.  

Ruegg discusses that it is important to communicate with dairy farm owners and employees what they can expect when implementing a clinical mastitis treatment protocol. In cases of clinical mastitis, milk is typically abnormal for 3.5 to 5 days and we can become biased by our interventions when they last 3 to 5 days. A culture-based treatment protocol allows the cow’s immune system to clear the infection without antimicrobial therapy and identifies those cases, using records, history and severity scoring system, to identify the cases that should be treated. 

Top Milk YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/uwmilkquality 

 Top Milk Website: https://topmilk.msu.edu/Resources/Treatment-of-Mastitis/Mastitis-Treatment  

 Pamela L. Ruegg, Making Antibiotic Treatment Decisions for Clinical Mastitis,
Veterinary Clinics of North America: Food Animal Practice, Volume 34, Issue 3, 2018, Pages 413-425, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cvfa.2018.06.002

 L. Oliveira, C. Hulland, P.L. Ruegg,
Characterization of clinical mastitis occurring in cows on 50 large dairy herds in Wisconsin,
Journal of Dairy Science, Volume 96, Issue 12, 2013, Pages 7538-7549,
https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.2012-6078