“With rare exceptions, researchers report few significant differences between approved intramammary (IMM) antibiotics in achieving bacteriological or clinical cure rates. ”
“Normal milk is not a reliable indicator of effectiveness. ”
“Don’t forget the difference between cow-level and quarter-level somatic cell count (SCC). ”
“Identify the cause of mastitis before treatment. ”
“Accurately measure culling due to mastitis.”
Judicious Antibiotics Use:
– Start with animal care -> Prioritize cows comfort to keep them healthy.
– Treat the infection, not the inflammation -> SCC measures inflammation, which can last twice as long as the infection resulting in unnecessary antibiotics use.
– Consider On-farm Culturing -> Only 30% of clinical mastitis cases may require treatment.
– Work with your team -> It takes a village.
As more research is being done on calf health, it is being discovered that common calf management practices that introduce antibiotics during critical development periods might be doing more harm than good.
Some of these practices include feeding waste milk with high levels of antibiotics, using medicated feed additives in nutrition plans and aggressive antibiotic usage in disease control. While these practices might have seemed effective in accomplishing their goal – keeping calves healthy – we now know that early introduction of antibiotics also can have serious downsides…
Dr. Eric Hillerton has been involved in Research around the world with regard to mastitis. This article is interesting and highlights the relevance today of topics of the past in our quest for better milk quality and animal health.
Do you wear gloves while milking cows? You should! Gloves are a very inexpensive prevention tool for a large cost problem. This preventative tool can help to prevent bacteria and dirt from staying in the cracks, crevices and fingernail beds on your hands. Gloves can easily be disinfected between cows because of their smooth surface. Studies have shown that there are 75% fewer bacteria on used gloves than on bare hands. Wearing gloves also reduces the spread of both contagious and environmental bacteria by 50%.
Calf raisers should not look at mortality rates as more important than treatment or morbidity rates. The goal should be to lower treatment rates. This, in turn, should lower mortality rates. If there is too much weight put on a herd’s mortality rate, more calves may be treated too many times just to keep them alive.
Mastitis in dairy cows is an infectious condition as a result of pathogens entering the udder through the teat canal.
Depending on the bacteria involved, the infection may be contagious and affect other cows in the herd as a result of transfer from cow to cow by milk contamination during the milking process.
Please listen to Dr Pamela Ruegg’s Global Dairy Expo 2020 presentation or read her papers on mastitis online to help with an understanding of the condition we refer to as mastitis. Ruegg refers to contagious bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactiae and also to the especially nasty form of mastitis that they experience with Mycoplasma bovis.
Farmers are buying more of the antibiotics classified as critically important for human health, despite dire warnings about drug resistant superbugs.
Dr Heather Hendrickson says consumers need to understand the seriousness of the threat posed by antibiotic resistance because it could ultimately fall to them to force a change…
… Every effort should be made to find the origin of the problem and identify the most effective treatment before antibiotics were used, he said.
In 2015, the association set the goal of wiping out prophylactic use of antibiotics for animal wellness by 2030.