A New Procedure for Controlling the Digital Dermatitis in a Large Dairy Herd

Digital dermatitis (DD) as an important infectious disease of the feet in dairy cows can cause mach economic losses. Many therapeutic procedures have been introduced and examined to treat and control the disease that each of them has some advantages, disadvantages and limitations; therefore, it is necessary to select the most proper method pertaining to management condition, economics, facilities and etc. in each farm. In a large dairy with a long history of DD, after several periodic herd treatments for two weeks any time, recurrence of the disease was encountered 3 to 6 months after each treatment. Because of the time consuming and high cost of this procedure and some other problems during doing it, a new more economic and simple therapeutic measure was examined for controlling the disease in the herd; therefore, after washing the feet of all cows and heifers of each stall in the milking room, they were treated with commercial Oxytetracyclin spray for one time, and clinical cases were recognized, isolated and treated for 1 to 2 more days. This measure was repeated in 45 days intervals.
Assessment of the lameness condition showed decrease in lameness score of ...