Mastitis therapy: Direct and indirect costs

Abstract

One of the most important problems in milk production, causing great economic loses is certainly mastitis. In order to minimize economic losses from mastitis dairy farms introduce different mastitis management programs. These programs include mastitis therapy and prevention. In mastitis control prevention is most important and when mastitis occurs cost of therapy and milk discharge is very important. In our study we examined cost of mastitis treatment and milk loss in different mastitis management programs. We concluded that most costly are mastitis caused by specific pathogens. Cost of milk loss is 2.4 times bigger than cost of drug consumption. Applying of tit-dipping has great importance in reduction of mastitis caused by specific pathogens and less importance for conditional saprophytes. In total, cost of mastitis treatment on whole farm was almost the same for all mastitis management programs, while the effect of the program on farm C was the most expensive in the cows with the finding of specific pathogens.