Test can assist with prevention and early treatment intervention against clinical mastitis to improve cow health and welfare.

June 19, 2018

2 Min Read
New blood test reveals susceptibility to clinical mastitis
Oregon State University

Oregon State University researchers have developed a blood test to identify dairy cows that are susceptible to bovine clinical mastitis. The interdisciplinary research team published its findings in the Journal of Dairy Science.

Bovine clinical mastitis, a bacterial infection of the udder, is the most prevalent and costly disease in the dairy industry, Oregon State said. Diagnosed shortly after calving, the disease strikes about 16.5% of U.S. dairy cows in the first 30 days of lactation. Clinical mastitis costs the dairy industry millions of dollars of lost milk income and loss of cows due to the disease, the announcement said.

The Oregon State test can assist with prevention and early treatment intervention against clinical mastitis, thereby improving cow health and welfare, said study lead author Gerd Bobe, an animal scientist in Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and Linus Pauling Institute.

The researchers identified biomarkers in the cows’ blood that could indicate which of them are at increased risk of a specific disease, Bobe said.

“After giving birth, all cows are highly vulnerable to serious infectious and metabolic diseases,” he said. “Long before they acquire the disease, these cows have a metabolic profile that indicates they are at an increased risk of disease.”

In nearly all cases, bovine clinical mastitis develops when the cow’s immune system isn’t able to defend against exposure to pathogenic bacteria at the end of the teat. Most of the time, the cow’s symptoms are mild: They produce milk lacking its normal consistency -- for example, flakes or clots -- so the milk must be discarded. In serious cases, the cow may also have a fever and won’t eat.

The Oregon State test makes it possible for a dairy farmer to use this test to determine which cows are at risk for the infection before it occurs, Bobe said.

The study cohort consisted of 161 healthy pregnant Holstein cows from a 1,000-head dairy farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Blood samples were collected weekly during the last three weeks before calving and again at calving. After calving, the researchers selected blood samples of eight cows that were diagnosed with clinical mastitis but no other diseases after calving and compared them with nine cows that remained healthy after calving.

The researchers used a form of advanced analytical chemistry — ultra-performance liquid chromatography high-resolution mass spectrometry — to analyze the blood samples for lipids and other circulating metabolites.

“At some point before calving, the cows got infected,” Bobe said. “This method allows us to determine when those cows were infected and needed to be treated.”

The study was funded by the Oregon State Agricultural Research Foundation and the Oregon Beef Council.

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