Agreement among bacteriological findings, vaginal discharges, and endometrial cytology for endometritis detection in postpartum beef cows.

Salah Mohammed,Abdul Haron,Nurhusien Degu,Rosnina Yusoff,Mohammed Omar,Siti Bejo

doi:10.9755/ejfa.2016-11-1561

Salah Mohammed, Abdul Haron + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.9755/ejfa.2016-11-1561

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Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate the relationship among vaginal discharges, bacteriological contamination, and endometrial cytology during 20–30 days postpartum in beef cows. A total of 82 beef cows, aged 3 years to 7 years and at 20–30 days post-calving, were enrolled in this study. All the cows were checked by transrectal palpation, ultrasound, and vaginal discharge collection. Endometrial cytology and bacteriological samples were then collected using a cytobrush technique. Nine of 82 beef cows (10.97%) had abnormal vaginal discharges and clinical endometritis (CE), and nine of 73 clinically healthy cows (12.32%) had subclinical endometritis (SCE). The agreement among endometrial examination, polymorphonuclear neutrophil percentage (PMN %), and vaginal discharge score (0–3) was moderate (k = 0.48, p < 0.01), whereas that between vaginal discharge score (0–3) and bacteriological finding was poor (k = 0.032, p = 0.51). The agreement between bacterial finding and PMN % was also poor (k = 0.15, p = 0.02). Escherichia coli was the most common bacteria isolated from healthy (14.6 %), CE (38.8 %), and SCE (42.8 %) cows. Moreover, E. coli was the major bacteriological risk factor for SCE occurrence. E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus were the most common risk factors for the occurrence of CE. The reproductive performance of beef cows was insignificantly affected by CE and SCE.

Highlights

The present study aims to assess the relationship among bacterial contamination, vaginal discharges, and endometrial cytology findings in postpartum beef cows and to determine the diagnostic value of these parameters for detection of Clinical endometritis (CE) and Subclinical endometritis (SCE)
The present study demonstrated the effect of body condition score (BCS) on SCE occurrence, which may be attributed to the effect of negative energy balance (NEB) after calving on the immunity of cows, thereby increasing the probability of uterine infection (Gilbert et al, 2005)
Hammon et al (2006) mentioned that uterine infection was accompanied with NEB, which begins before birth and continues through the early lactation; this study reported that cows with acute NEB exhibit reduced neutrophil function and developed SCE

Summary

Introduction

All postpartum cows suffer from pathogenic microorganism contamination of the uterus 2 weeks to 3 weeks after parturition, and more than 80% of the cows after calving are exposed to uterine contamination by Escherichia coli, Fusobacterium sp., Arcanobacterium pyogenes, Streptococcus sp., Staphylococcus sp., Clostridium sp., Pasteurella multocida, and Bacteroides sp (Sheldon et al, 2006). Uterine infection can be categorized into puerperal metritis, clinical metritis, clinical endometritis, and subclinical endometritis (Sheldon et al, 2006). Clinical endometritis (CE) is known as endometrial inflammation with purulent or mucopurulent discharge; this disease can be detected 21 days after calving and is not associated with clinical signs of sickness (Sheldon et al, 2006). The term “purulent vaginal discharge” has been adopted for use as instead of term CE because the Received: 03 November 2016; Revised: 20 January 2017; Accepted: 23 January 2017; Published Online: 29 January 2017

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