Emerging mastitis pathogens

Mastitis means inflammation of the parenchyma of the mammary gland. Many infective agents have been implicated as causes of mastitis. Worldwide, farmers have achieved tremendous success in reducing the incidence of contagious mastitis by adopting the traditional methods of mastitis control. The greatest impact of these control measures has been on infections caused by the contagious bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactia. But this success has not been demonstrated for clinical mastitis caused by other agents. Organisms such as coagulase negative Staphylococci, environmental Streptococci, Mycoplasma spp and Serratia spp have increasingly been isolated from dairy herds that had low somatic cell counts