Evaluation of a culture-based pathogen identification kit for bacterial causes of bovine mastitis

摘要

Mastitis is estimated to be the most common reason for antimicrobial use in the dairy industry. Identification of mastitis-causing organisms on individual farms is a long-established component of prevention and control planning. A more recent development has been the use of pathogen identification to implement selective antimicrobial treatment protocols in individual animals. Several authors have reported that many mild to moderate clinical mastitis cases do not benefit from antimicrobial therapy depending on the causative pathogen. Selective treatment therefore provides the opportunity to reduce unnecessary antimicrobial use. On-farm culture-based pathogen detection kits (that allow crude identification of pathogens within 18 to 24 hours) have beenused successfully for this purpose in dairy herds in the USA. The test characteristics of such kits have not previously been reported in UK dairy herds. An understanding of the likely performance of these test kits is a necessary first step towards implementing selective treatment protocols.