Mastitis management and treatment

If untreated, mastitis can cause prolonged acute or chronic illness and low productivity and even death of dairy cows. However, recovery after shorter periods (days to weeks) have been more frequently observed, but since animal welfare considerations require sick animals to be treated, very few 

Severe mastitis Mild mastitis secretory disfunction  

All cardinal All cardinal Regularly Regularly No inflammation No inflammation No inflammation No inflammation 

The objective of mastitis treatments is to cure the infected udders from the infection, but cure is defined in very different ways. For example, in economic terms, the farmer needs to achieve a level of udder health that allows expected milk yields and quality parameters specified by processors/ national regulations to be achieved. On the other hand, cure with respect to antibiotic treatments, is often defined in terms of absence of bacterial pathogens in milk (bacterial cure), with the proportion of cows without detectable pathogen presence following treatment being defined as the bacterial cure rate (BCR). The main problem with using BCR as the main indicator of cure is that it was frequently shown to include a proportion of cows with drastically elevated SCC values (indicative of sub-clinical mastitis) after treatment, but without clinical (sensory) symptoms. 

The use of more selective antibiotics should be considered where diagnostic tests have accurately identified the disease-causing organism. Appropriate antibiotic therapy is complex and the reader is referred to relevant veterinary textbooks such as Andrews (2000) for a more detailed description. However, several important principles and approaches to antibiotic therapies used for mastitis are described below. 

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