Acoustic Pulse Therapy (APT) as non-antibiotic treatment and prevention for mastitis in dairy cows

Abstract

The prevalence of clinical and subclinical mammary infections ranges between 20 to 40%. As of today, the excess drug treatment in clinical mammary infections are antibiotics given during lactation. In cases of subclinical infections, no treatment is used during lactation and treatment is delivered upon entry into the dry-off period. In recent years, the awareness of the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria led to legislative processes to reduce the use of antibiotics in animal farming, therefore there is a need for a non-antibiotic treatment for mastitis. Acoustic Pulse Therapy (APT), known as “shockwave treatment”, has been widely reported to be used in orthopedics, physiotherapy, sports medicine, urology, and veterinary medicine. APT produces various responses in biological tissues, such as angiogenesis and antiinflammatory effects. A new APT-based device developed specifically for treating dairy cows produces high power, deep penetration acoustic pulses distributed over a large treatment area. Previously a number of experiments with APT were conducted on 262 cows identified with clinical or subclinical mastitis and showed >70% success in curing the infected quarter. Significant milk yield increase, reduction in SCC as well as bacterial elimination was shown, with an 80% reduction in culling rate of clinically infected cows in the APT group compared to the control group. The specific objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of APT on SCC and milk yield when applied on cows at the dry-off period.