Evaluation of the Use of Pegbovigrastim on Blood Count and Clinical Mastitis of Dairy Cattle Under Field Grazing Conditions

摘要

The dairy cow's peri-partum period is associated with a high incidence of inter-related health events. During this period, clinical mastitis (CM) shows the highest incidence in the dairy cow. Clinical mastitis cases occurring during early lactation have a more detrimental effect compared to cases in late lactation. Risk of diseases has been linked to immunosuppression during the transition period. Kimura et al. (2014) reported that a pegylated form of the granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (pegbovigrastim) increased neutrophil numbers in dairy cows when given before and at the time of calving. Currently, no data are available on the use of pegbovigrastim as a preventative for clinical disease in commercial grazing herds. Moreover, as far as we know only two field trials including 17 and 4 confined commercial dairy herds are available in the peer-reviewed literature on the use of pegbovigrastim, reporting a decreased incidence of CM cases by approximately 35% (Canning et al., 2017). Therefore, the objectives of the present study were to preliminary determine the effect of pegbovigrastim on white blood cell (WBC) counts and on the occurrence of CM cases in cows under commercial grazing dairy herds.