Abstract
Over the last few years, the adoption of automatic milking systems (AMS) has experienced significant increase. However, hardly any studies have been conducted to investigate the distribution of mastitis pathogens in dairy herds with AMS. Because quick mastitis detection in AMS is very important, the primary objective of this study was to determine operational reliability and sensibility of mastitis detection systems from AMS. Additionally, the frequency of pathogen-specific was determined. For this purpose, 228 cows from ten farms in Galicia (NW Spain) using this system were investigated. The California Mastitis Test (CMT) was considered the gold-standard test for mastitis diagnosis and milk samples were analysed from CMT-positive cows for the bacterial examination. Mean farm prevalence of clinical mastitis was 9% and of 912 milk quarters examined, 23% were positive to the AMS mastitis detection system and 35% were positive to the CMT. The majority of CMT-positive samples had a score of 1 or 2 on a 1 (lowest mastitis severity) to 4 (highest mastitis severity) scale. The average sensitivity and specificity of the AMS mastitis detection system were 58.2% and 94.0% respectively being similar to other previous studies, what could suggest limitations for getting higher values of reliability and sensibility in the current AMSs. The most frequently isolated pathogens were Streptococcus dysgalactiae (8.8%), followed by Streptococcus uberis (8.3%) and Staphylococcus aureus (3.3%). The relatively high prevalence of these pathogens indicates suboptimal cleaning and disinfection of teat dipping cups, brushes and milk liners in dairy farms with AMS in the present study.
Highlights
Bovine mastitis can be classified into sub-clinical, clinical and chronic forms, depending on the presence and duration of symptoms and the macroscopic appearance of the milk
The interpretation can be subjective, and this might result in false positives and negatives (Viguier et al, 2009), the California Mastitis Test (CMT)- score is a quick, easy and cheap test for pointing out quarters with clinical mastitis (Rasmussen, 2001; Lam et al, 2009) and subclinical mastitis (Fouz et al, 2004)
In terms of mastitis detection, the minimum recommendations are a sensitivity of 80% and a specificity of 99% (Hogeveen et al, 2010), our automatic milking systems (AMS) mastitis detection system did not reach these figures and our results do not agree with other researchers who reported higher values for specificity and sensitivity in both conventional milking systems (Lam et al, 2009) and in AMS (Steeneveld et al, 2010a)
Summary
Bovine mastitis can be classified into sub-clinical, clinical and chronic forms, depending on the presence and duration of symptoms and the macroscopic appearance of the milk. The most commonly used diagnostic method for mastitis detection is to observe the visible indications during milking. Clinical mastitis may go unnoticed in cows milked with an automatic milking system (AMS), where the farmer is not present during milking and no specific mastitis diagnostic methods are employed (Hogeveen et al, 2010). During automatic milking reliable and sensitive methods are necessary (Viguier et al, 2009) and farmers need mastitis detection systems that produce a low number of false positives and negatives (Mollenhorst et al, 2012). To avoid false-positive alerts the AMS needs high specificity (Steeneveld et al, 2010b). Evaluating the performance of automated mastitis-detection systems with respect to their practical value on a farm will allow farmers to compare different mastitis-detection systems sensibly and fairly before investing (Kamphuis et al, 2013)
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