Evaluation of effects of Mycoplasma mastitis on milk composition in dairy cattle from South Australia

Abstract

Background Mycoplasma mastitis is increasingly posing significant impact on dairy industry. Although the effects of major conventional mastitis pathogens on milk components has been widely addressed in the literature, limited data on the effects of different Mycoplasma and Acholeplasma spp. on milk quality and quantity is available. The aim of this study was to determine the casual relationship of Mycoplasma spp. and A. laidlawii to mastitis and compare them to subclinical mastitis caused by conventional mastitis pathogens from a single dairy herd in South Australia; Mycoplasma spp. and A. laidlawii were detected using PCR applied directly to milk samples. The herd had mastitis problem with high somatic cell count and low response rate to conventional antimicrobial therapy. A total of 288 cow-level milk samples were collected aseptically and used in this study.ResultsConventional culture showed a predominance of coagulase-negative staphylococci, followed by coagulase-positive staphylococci, Streptococcus spp., Enterococcus spp., E. coli, and Klebsiella spp. PCR results showed a high prevalence of mycoplasmas (76.7%), including A. laidlawii (10.8%), M. bovis (6.2%), M. bovirhinis (5.6%), M. arginini (2%), and (52.1%) of cows were co-infected with two or more Mycoplasma and Acholeplasma species. Mycoplasma co-infection significantly increased somatic cell counts (SCC) similar to conventional mastitis pathogens and compared to non-infected cows with 389.3, 550.3 and 67.3 respectively; and decreased the milk yield with 29.0, 29.9 and 34.4 l, respectively. Mycoplasma co-infection caused significant increase in protein percentage, and significant decrease in fat percentage and total milk solids, similar to other conventional mastitis pathogens. In contrast, changes in milk composition and yield caused by various individual Mycoplasma species were non-significant.Conclusions Mycoplasma mastitis had on-farm economic consequences similar to common conventional mastitis pathogens. Results of our study indicate that co-infection Mycoplasma mastitis caused similar effect on milk composition to other mastitis pathogens and we hope these findings raise the awareness of the importance of their detection on routine diagnostic panels.

Changes in cellular factors of local immunity udder of cows with mastitis

“…While most of the techniques are based on determining the number of somatic cells as a diagnostic criterion for the diagnosis of subclinical pathology of cows (Yablonskyi and Zhelavskyi, 2007;Kurjogi et al, 2014;Thompson-Crispi et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2015;Delfani et al, 2017;Cao et al, 2018). Despite this, the researchers constantly encountered problems in interpreting the results (Singh et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2014;Al-Farha et al, 2017;Sato et al, 2017). It was related to the of dynamic changes in the quantitative composition of somatic cells in different periods of lactation, daily oscillations in their numbers; study species and individual peculiarities of animals (Zhelavskyi, 2005;Kurjogi et al, 2014;Lombardini et al, 2017;Pang et al, 2017).…”

Sığır Sütü Mollekütlerinin Saha İzolatlarının Tespiti Için Kültür ve PCR Yöntemlerinin Karşılaştırması

“…Some studies claim that Acholeplasma species, another genus of the mollicutes class, considered as non-pathogenic saprophyte and milk contaminant [7,8] . However, other studies have shown that involving of A. laidlawii in mastitis cannot be excluded [9][10][11] . Additionally, Acholeplasma axanthum has been isolated from bovine milk harvested from cattle suffering from mastitis [4] .…”

“…However, most previous studies targeted species-specific oligonucleotides and disregarded co-infection of Mycoplasma and Acholeplasma species. The clinical importance of co-infection with Mycoplasma has been reported [9,21] . Given that mollicutes have a small genome and low G-C content [22] , a sensitive, accurate and broad-species detection is required.…”

Seroprevalence of Mycoplasma bovis in grazing dairy cows from five different areas in Serbia

“…Mycoplasma bovis infection is of major importance in cattle production in European countries and the United States of America (USA), causing large economic losses (Tenk, 2005).In Europe, the damage caused annually by mycoplasmosis in general in cattle is estimated at 576 million Euros and is responsible for one third of all pneumonia cases in calves. In the last decade M. bovis infection has been expanded to new geographical areas, including Ireland (Blackburn et al, 2007;Bell et al, 2012) and Greece (Filioussis et al, 2007), where it was not previously registered, as well as on other continents: parts of South America (Cerdá et al, 2000) and Australia (Al-Farha et al, 2017).…”