Investigation on bovine mastitis caused by Staphylococcus Aureus

A study on clinical and subclinical mastitis was conducted for a period of five months in crossbred dairy cows to reveal prevalence of S. aureus. Among the 29 milk samples from the clinical mastitis cases, 37.93 per cent (11/29) had S. aureus, whereas from 78 subclinical mastitis (apparently healthy) cases, 3.85 per cent (3/78) revealed the presence of S. aureus as pathogen. The prevalence of Proteus and Candida was also detected in some of the healthy and affected quarters. The in vitro antibiotic sensitivity test revealed that tetracycline was the most effective (78.57%) antibiotic against S. aureus in clinical and subclinical cases of mastitis. Thus S. aureus appeared to be the major cause of clinical mastitis in crossbred cattle and the drug of choice in these cases could be tetracycline.