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Economic consequences of an evidence-based mastitis therapy concept
Schmenger, A.; Leimbach, S...
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Objectives: The economic significance of targeted evidence-based mastitis treatment protocols is unclear. On the one hand, a greater diagnostic effort is required before therapy, and on the other hand, certain treatments are dispensed with. In a field study in which an evidence-based mastitis therapy system was established on dairy farms, the main economic aspects were recorded to carry out not only a medical evaluation but also an economic assessment.
Material and methods: In a three-year field study, the effects of establishing a targeted mastitis therapy concept based on clinical scoring, the consideration of the animal's individual mastitis history and the application of an on-farm test before therapy selection were examined on 1392 mastitis cases in 5 dairy farms in Northern Germany. All clinical mastitis cases and treatment data were recorded over the entire duration of the study. After analyzing the existing conventional therapy concepts of the farms, the mastitis therapy concept and the on-farm culture mastDecide® were introduced. Three treatment groups were compared: the conventional treatment group – before introducing the new concept (n = 483), the targeted therapy group (n = 506) and the modified targeted therapy group (n = 403), including the cases in which farmers deviated from the therapy concept. The investigated approach did not lead to any change in bacteriological and cytological cure rates, new infection rates or recurrence rates. The two targeted treatment groups hardly differed in terms of cures and treatment effort (P> 0.05).
Results: The application of the test and the implementation of the targeted therapy concept as recommended resulted in a saving of 67.4 % of intramammary antibiotic doses and 63.8 % of systemic antibiotic doses compared to the conventional treatment. Furthermore, this procedure led to a lower application effort (- 56.3 %) and a reduction of milk that could not be delivered (-25.1 %). These savings were offset by increased costs due to the on-farm tests used and the time required for using the on-farm test. Included in the cost calculation are: the amount of milk discarded, the time spent on rapid diagnosis and treatment of the animals, the cost of the rapid test and the cost of pharmaceuticals. For the average case of mastitis treated with a targeted treatment concept, the costs in total were lower by 33.20 €. The reduction of costs depended on the pathogen group and amounted to 25.4 % of the costs of standard therapy for Gram-negative microorganisms, 22.9 % for Gram-positive microorganisms and 29.1 % for samples without bacterial growth, respectively.
Conclusion: With the help of the targeted evidence-based mastitis therapy concept, a reduction of antibiotic doses by more than 60 % and of costs by 25.7 % were achieved with unaffected cure rates.
Keywords: Mastitis, treatment, economics, targeted.
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Affiliation of the authors at the time of publication
Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hannover, Germany;
Kopenhagen University, Kopenhagen, Denmark.
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