Veterinary Medicine

Bovine mastitis, which is an inflammation of the mammary gland frequently resulting from bacterial infection, causes the majority of economic losses to the dairy producers. The prevalence of mastitis in dairy cattle is relatively high. Bovine mastitis can be classified based on clinical futures as clinical or subclinical. Both forms produce significant economic losses due to rejected milk, degraded milk quality, early culling of cows, drug costs, veterinary expenses and increased labour costs for the farmer. Moreover, subclinical mastitis is the main form of mastitis in modern dairy herds, exceeding 20 to 50% of cows in given herds. The cost of subclinical mastitis is very difficult to quantify, but most of the researchers agree that it can be up to 40 times more common than clinical mastitis. In India, the estimated loss due to mastitis is around Rs. 16,702 million per annum. Subclinical mastitis was found more important in India than clinical mastitis especially in cows (10-50%) and buffaloes (5-20%). The predominant causal organisms of mastitis are cell-walled bacteria, although mycoplasma, yeast and algae have also been reported to cause mastitis. Various predisposing factors like physiological, genetic, pathological or environmental may contribute to the emergence of mastitis in dairy cattle. Presently antibiotics are used for the treatment of mastitis. However, therapeutic success rate is poor due to indiscriminate use of antibiotics leading to development of multiple drug resistant pathogens. Besides this, major problems in bovine mastitis with intracellular pathogens like S.aureus because of poor cure rate. These facts highlight the need for completely newer strategies for treatment of mastitis.