Laboratory Evaluation of Two Potential On-farm Culture Systems for Clinical Mastitis Cases

Abstract

In Canada, mastitis treatment accounts for more than half of all antibiotics used by dairy producers. Treatment decisions are often made without knowledge of the pathogen, therefore, researchers have called for a more targeted approach to antibiotic therapy for clinical mastitis. The overall hypothesis of this project is that the use of rapid on-farm tools for the identification of mastitis pathogens will result in therapy decisions that will decrease antibiotic use, without compromising short or long term cow or herd mastitis outcomes. The objective of this study was to determine test characteristics and compare two potential on-farm culture systems, the Minnesota Easy Culture System II Bi-plate (University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN) and 3M Petrifilm™ (3M Microbiology, London, ON).