The International Dairy Federatoin (IDF) has released a guidance that dives deep into defining clearer definitions of clinical, subclinical, and chronic mastitis cured cases as well as udder and quarter health status.
The guidance looks at the latest technology to provide relevant guidelines on how to produce clearer definitions of a new case of clinical and subclinical mastitis through trusted scientific information and expert opinion. The bulletin has also been described as a complementary to the IDF Bulletin 321/1997: Recommendations for the presentation of mastitis related data and IDF Bulletin 448/2011: Suggested interpretation of mastitis terminology.
Mastitis is an inflammation of the mammary gland caused by trauma or an infection, leading to abnormal and decreased milk production, and the development of mastitis can be described in different stages. The initial stages begin with a bacterial infection, which then progresses to inflammation, resulting in a clinical and bacteriological cure or non-cure.
The 27-page paper is broken down into sections, with chapter 4 exploring the following topics:

“As technology is continuously advancing in the areas of microbiological diagnosis, it is becoming increasingly complex to define mastitis, therefore, there is a need to target these definitions to their specific applications to make it easier for the end-user," said David Kelton, chair of the Standing Committee for Animal Health and Welfare. "By having new or updated definitions, this will increase the accuracy of mastitis prevalence assessment, while updated definitions of new cases of subclinical or clinical mastitis should improve the consistency in the calculation of the incidence of mastitis in a herd.”
Bulletin of the IDF No. 515, Guidelines for defining quarter and udder health status and cured clinical and subclinical mastitis cases is now available to purchase on the IDF website.