PREVENTION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR MASTITIS IN DAIRY CATTLE

Abstract

Bovine mastitis is the most economically relevant disease of the world dairy industry with the rising cases of antimicrobial resistance making the traditional antibiotic treatment less effective. The evidence used in this systematic review was 123 studies published between 2015 and 2025 to determine the comparative effectiveness of conventional antimicrobials, alternative interventions, diagnostic interventions, and integrated management approaches in controlling mastitis in dairy cows. Findings have indicated that the most common pathogen in clinical mastitis is still Staphylococcus aureus, with 23.4 per cent rates, then Escherichia coli with 18.7 per cent and multidrug resistance levels are 72.3 per cent and 58.9 per cent, respectively in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Trueperella pyogenes. Phage therapy and silver nanoparticles had bacteriological cure rates of 74.5 percent and 71.2 percent respectively, which are not inferior to the conventional cephalosporins (78.4 percent) but with much less competition emergence at 5.6 percent than 34.7 percent. The persistence of biofilm-forming infections was explained by a strong positive correlation between biofilm biomass and oxacillin minimum inhibitory concentration and the ratio between minimum biofilm eradication concentration and minimum inhibitory concentration was over 67-fold with strong biofilm producers. The economic scenario had an integrated biosecurity program with the least net cost of 198.70 US dollars per cow-year which was lower than the blanket dry-cow therapy at 278.90 US dollars and the no-intervention scenario at 587.40 US dollars. Diagnostic tests such as MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry with a sensitivity of 98.5 percent and a turnaround time of 12.5 minutes and quantitative polymerase chain reaction with a sensitivity of 97.3 percent made possible selective therapy to reduce the use of antimicrobials by about 40 percent. It is noteworthy that since 2022, coagulase-negative staphylococci have become the most common cause of subclinical mastitis, rising to 21.8 percent prevalence, replacing 12.4 percent. This review concludes that a combination of enhanced biosecurity, rapid molecular diagnostics, selective dry-cow therapy, and new non-antibiotic therapies (phage therapy and nanotechnology-based teat disinfectants) should be implemented as part of coordinated antimicrobial stewardship programs to maintain antibiotic activity and safeguard the health of both animals and humans.