Infectious aetiologies of mastitis on Korean dairy farms during 2008

The objective of this study was to determine the frequency of different mastitis pathogens in 1255 milk samples collected from 368 lactating cows on 24 dairy farms in Korea during 2008. The proportion of cows and quarter milk samples having SCC200,000 cells/ml, an indicator of udder infection, was 54.3% (200/368 cows) and 35.5% (446/1255 samples), respectively. Of the 446 milk samples subjected to bacteriological examination, 16.5% (74) showed no bacterial growth and 3.5% (16) were contaminated. In total, 356 of 1255 (28.3%) samples were bacteriologically positive, from which 415 bacteria were isolated. The most frequently isolated pathogen was coagulase-negative staphylococci (40.7%), followed by Gram-negative bacteria (19.5%) other than Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus (12.2%), Streptococcus uberis (5.3%), Enterococcus spp. (4.8%), E. coli (4.5%), and environmental streptococci (3.1%) other than S. uberis. This study demonstrates that environmental pathogens were the vast majority of bacteria isolated from mastitic bovine milk samples in Korea.