Prevalence of Mycoplasma Mastitis in Buffaloes of Pakistan – A Pilot Study in the Centre-West of Balochistan

Abstract

Bovine intramammary inflammation is one of the most important endemic and a mainly general infection of dairy animals which causes drastic losses in terms of reduced milk production and quality, costly medication and culling of important animals. Mastitis is responsible for poor milk quality in terms of direct hygienic quality and indirect quality characteristics of milk (Radostits et al., 2007;Bilal et al., 2004). Mastitic animals also have a deleterious Short CommunicationAbstract |Mycoplasma are known to cause several diseases in bovine animals including mastitis. The prevalence of mycoplasma mastitis is reported from many parts of the world in farm animals. The response of antimicrobials against this infection is very poor that usually lead to culling of infected animals. In Pakistan, unfortunately no data is available on the occurrence of mycoplasma mastitis in farm animals. Therefore, current field investigation was conducted first time in centre-west Balochistan to get the preliminary data on mycoplasma mastitis. Milk samples (n = 579) were collected from three districts viz., Jaffar abad, Sohbat pur and Naseer abad from mastitis suspected buffaloes. The samples were collected from those animals which had abnormal milk or physical signs (like swelling, abscess, wound etc.) on udder or teats or have suddenly dropped milk production. All samples were cultured on PPLO (pleuropneumonia like organism) media and were found negative for Mycoplasma spp. The prevalence of mycoplasma mastitis in this population of dairy buffaloes was recorded <0.23%. The study results suggested that the mycoplasma mastitis did not exist in buffaloes of study area, however, further studies using molecular tools are warranted to validate these findings.