Abstract
Mastitis is one of the most significant problems to the dairy all over the world. In addition to production losses, mastitis also deteriorates the chemical, and physical properties of milk which ultimately leads to poor shelf life of processed milk The present study was designed to evaluate a non-proprietary, non-antibiotic preparation containing trisodium citrate, Vitamin C, Zinc sulphate and Copper sulphate in treating sub-clinical mastitis in dairy cows. For this purpose, cows suffering from subclinical mastitis (n=40) were selected and randomly divided into two groups. The animals of group A (n=20) were treated orally with a combination of tri-sodium citrate (40 gm), vitamin C (10 g), zinc sulphate (3 g) and copper sulphate (1 g) for 7 days. Group B was treated with standard mastitis therapy (Tylosin at a dose rate of 10 mg/kg for three days intramuscular and amoxicillin + clavulanic acid at 600 mg intramammary infusion daily for five days). The efficacy of the treatment was evaluated through surf field mastitis test (SFMT) scores and microbiological examination. The findings of the study revealed that administration of oral non-antibiotic formulation resulted in a better quarter based SFMT cure rate. The values observed for SFMT based cure rates in sub-clinically mastitic cows at the termination of study were 90.90% and 88.46% for groups A and B, respectively. The observed bacteriological cure rate for group A (tri-sodium citrate, vit. C, ZnSO4 and CuSO4) was 72.73%, and 69.23% for group B (antibiotic). The findings of the current study showed that the use of a combination therapy of nonantibiotic chemicals has potential impact on treating sub-clinical mastitis in dairy animals.