Mastitis worlwide: Are costs and prevention strategies similar from one country to another?
Bovine mastitis is certainly a worldwide problem affecting almost every dairy farm on earth, but what about the costs on every country? Are direct and indirect expenses of this disease similar worldwide, or are they different? Are farmers all over the world using the same prevention strategies? Renowned experts from many different countries share their experiences here…
This video contains an interview with several milk quality experts from over 10 different countries who speak about the costs of bovine mastitis in their countries and the strategies they use to succeed in controlling it.
Among others, Ynte Schukken (The Netherlands), Andrew Biggs (UK), John Middleton (USA), Oriol Franquesa (Spain), Sofie Piepers (Belgium) or Marcos Veiga (Brasil) give us their point of view on the subject “How do you deal with mastitis in your country?“, focusing on the main aspects relating to bovine mastitis: Costs, prevention and status monitoring.
Costs
All these experts talk about costs, the different types of mastitis they are dealing with, the different farm situations… And we can see how it was a problem that affects farms from all over the world in a very similar way, from Europe to Amercia or Asia.
Andrew Biggs (UK), among others, commented on the economic impact –direct and indirect costs– that bovine mastitis, whether clinical or subclinical, has on a holding.
And the risks associated with having to treat animals with antibiotics!
Preventive Strategy
In order to prevent bovine mastitis, the experts advised against using a single strategy, because there are many different pathogens and, because they have different mechanisms of action, it is impossible to control them all in the same way.
Doctor Ynte Shukken, after years of studying different mastitis control plans, taught us that, in “mastitis control, 1+1=3”, referring to the fact that good management and a good vaccination programme will lead to better results.
For this reason, a good vaccination strategy against bovine mastitis, is necessary because it helps to boost specific immunity and reduce the severity of mastitis as well as reducing the spread of infection.
Together with management, vaccination is a key tool within any general mastitis control plan.
Follow-up
As we commented a few posts back, it is important to monitor the farm’s results, whether on the basis of somatic cell counts or clinical cases, in order to ascertain the effectiveness of the prevention plans implemented on the farm.
And this is exactly what the opinion leaders talk about in our video.
With the results at our fingertips, we can see what the return is on our investment.
This is exactly what Doctor Andrew Bradley did to assess the implementation of vaccination programmes on various farms in the UK, finding a return on investment of 2.6 pounds for every pound invested in vaccination.
