Association Between Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test Results and Bacteriological Cure of Mild and Moderate Bovine...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global concern partly driven by excessive antimicrobial use (AMU) in animal production. Clinical mastitis (CM) is a leading cause of AMU in dairy farms, highlighting its importance from a public-health perspective. This observational study aimed to evaluate the use of antimicrobial susceptibility testing as a criterion for selecting antimicrobials for the treatment of mild and moderate CM in dairy cows. To this end, the association between in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility test results of mastitis-causing pathogens and in vivo bacteriological cure (BC) was assessed. A total of 340 cows with mild or moderate CM from 14 commercial dairy herds in Brazil were enrolled in the study. Isolates from the pretreatment milk samples were subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) using agar disk diffusion. Susceptibility results and cow-level variables were included in a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to evaluate their association with BC. No significant association was found between the antimicrobial susceptibility results and BC of the mastitis cases. In conclusion, although in vitro susceptibility testing remains an important tool for AMR surveillance, the findings of this study suggest that its utility in guiding antimicrobial treatment decisions in CM cases is limited.