Diagnostic tools to monitor udder health in dairy goats

This article discusses the use of somatic cell count (SCC) and bacteriological culture (BC) as monitoring tools to assess the udder health situation of dairy goats. Both SCC and BC can be applied for milk samples from individual goats or at bulk milk samples. The causative agent of primary concern in the dairy goat industry is Staphylococcus aureus. This pathogen strongly increases goat milk SCC. The SCC is therefore a useful test to detect S. aureus-infected goats. However, several non-infectious factors, most importantly the stage of lactation, also influence SCC, complicating the interpretation of this test. BC has a low sensitivity for the detection of S. aureus-infected goats, but is a valuable tool to obtain information on which bacterial species are responsible for udder health problems in a herd.