How to avoid a mastitis meltdown

Don Crowley

of infection that farmers will now be facing.

This mastitis is mainly in the environment but has a contagious nature — it can be passed from cow to cow via milking liners.

It is something that can escalate suddenly and the herd received a sudden outbreak of severe clinical mastitis resulting in very sick cows, elevated temperature, swollen quarters and all requiring veterinary intervention.

It can be very aggressive and lead to very sick cows if missed over 12 hours, and it’s a dairy farmers nightmare as it typically will infect your best milking lowest SCC cows.

You need to act on it very swiftly. The other Staph aureus mastitis was more of a slow burner and it built up over months with cell counts slowly rising. However, this new bacteria can takeover in the space of a week.

In a lot of these scenarios they can get clinical mastitis and still maintain a good cell count in the tank. They’re looking good but suffering in silence.

Immediately, in this case we took culture samples from the 130 cow herd that showed Strep uberus was present and we stepped in to troubleshoot to assess any possible causes.

We worked with the milking technician and vet to remedy the faults identified and establish the best treatment.

Cleanliness

The cleanliness procedure for milking was pre-spay and dry wipe, attach cluster and post spray after milking with a ready to use teat dip.

However, on investigation the teat condition was very good, but there was evidence of teat end damage.

This type of damage is caused by one or a combination of the following — excessive vacuum, faulty pulsation, over milking and removing clusters under vacuum.

During milking we established there was an issue with automatic cluster removers and an issue with the operating vacuum of the machine.

The cluster removers were removing clusters under vacuum damaging the teat ends and the operating vacuum was 51kpa, this should ideally be 46 to 48kpa.

These issues resulted in trauma over time to the teat ends, which compromised the cows own defence system and enabled an outbreak of Strep uberus mastitis in the herd.

The infection was then picked up from the cubicles as cows had access to them after milking prior to moving to pasture. A significant number would lie down on the cubicles after milking where the teat ends came in contact with the bacteria.

One of the most important things is to make sure that the parlour is fully serviced before resuming milking in a spring-calving herd. Also, many farmers cut back on milk recording due to financial con- straints but this is a vital tool in helping detect issues. Ideally, the first milk recording samples should be taken before the middle of March.

Don Crowley is a Teagasc dairy advisor based in Clonakilty, Co Cork