Bovine Mastitis Costs: An easy way to show your clients the real loss

Mastitis is the most costly disease. As vets, we are aware of this, right? And we are prepared to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases… However, when it comes to our clients -who are becoming more and more professional- they tend to prioritize the profits of their business and to focus on costs reduction. Find here several indicators and online tools to help you calculate the real loss of bovine mastitis and to show farmers that prevention strategies can stop them from losing money!

We know some markets are now suffering for the decrease in the milk price, and now is the time to put some value on the disease and to show farmers how our actions can stop them from losing money on their farms!

How much does a clinical case cost?

With regards to bovine mastitis costs, we need to differentiate between clinical and subclinical cases.

Many publications have tried to find “the magic number”; among them, we find Ott S., who at the NMC 1999 estimated the cost to dairy herds in the USA at around one billion dollars. In 2006 the estimate was two billion.

When talking about the individual basis, the cost in Spain is around 250eur/cow/year.

Regarding subclinical cases, a paper from Ireland by Geary U. et al. estimated the costs at 48€/1000L (working with SCC) using the LS3 (Table I).

Table I: Relationship between SCC, linear score (LS) and production losses R.F.Raubertas & G.E. Shook (1982)

So we can have 2 easy parameters to work with, and we can quantify the economic losses to our clients in order to emphasize the importance of improving preventive actions (such as vaccination) related to udder health on our farms.

Also, there are few online calculators to know more in detail the cost of mastitis in specific cases, like for example STARTCost.

This online calculator will allow you to know your farm costs, find out the costs associated with clinical and subclinical mastitis and analyse the production losses associated with mastitis.

Depending on the amount of info you add there, you’ll be able to know more in detail where are your cusotmers loosing more money!

References:

1| Ott SL 1999: Cost of herd level production losses associated with subclinical mastitis in U.S. dairy cows NMC annual Meeting proceedings 199:152

2| U.Geary et al. – 2013 : Examining the impact of mastitis on the profitability of the Irish dairy industry

3| R.F. Raubertas & G.E. Shook 1982 : Relationship between lactation measures of Somatic Cell Count and milk yield J.D.Science 65 419-425