A survey on the incidence of Prototheca mastitis in dairy herds in Lublin province, Poland

Prevalence of Prototheca spp. on dairy farms in Poland – a cross‐country study

“…from environmental sites was 21.1%. These results are similar to those from other studies, where the overall environmental prevalence of the algae ranged from 8.9% to 47% (Anderson and Walker, ; Osumi et al ., ; Jagielski et al ., ). Prototheca spp.…”

“…Conversely, five dairy farms, where no infected cows were identified, yielded Prototheca ‐positive environmental samples. This is again what was observed in the past (Anderson and Walker, ; Jagielski et al ., ). Whereas finding of Prototheca spp.…”

“…Both these values fall in the middle of those reported for dairy herds outside Poland, ranging from 5% up to 16.8% (Costa et al, 1996;Buzzini et al, 2004;Bueno et al, 2006;Shahid et al, 2016) Interestingly, the prevalence of Prototheca mastitis from this study was much higher than in most of the previously published reports from Poland, with the proportion of cows excreting Prototheca algae in their milk being usually below 0.5% (Krukowski, 2006;Krukowski et al, 2009). Only two recent studies have reported Prototheca incidences of 4.6% and 12.6% Jagielski et al, 2018). These differences can be explained by different geographical coverages of individual studies (three of four provinces with the highest prevalences of Prototheca mastitis had never been surveyed before) or sampling season (early spring and late summer are the periods of an increased abundance of the algae in the environment).…”

“…Significantly higher SCCs were observed for quarter milk of cows with CM (mean SCC, 9 × 10 6 cells ml −1 ). These results are in line with earlier studies which documented protothecal infections as exclusively or predominantly subclinical (Shahid et al ., ; Jagielski et al ., ) with persistently high (> 10 9 cells ml −1 ) SSCs (Jagielski et al ., , ; Wawron et al ., ). However, several studies have described outbreaks of Prototheca mastitis with clinical manifestations only or in a vast excess over subclinical forms (Gao et al ., ; Ricchi et al ., ).…”

“…() and with a PCR restriction‐enzyme analysis (PCR‐REA) assay of partial cytB gene, as proposed by Jagielski et al . ().…”