Effect of repeated episodes of generic clinical mastitis on milk yield in dairy cows

Our objective was to estimate the milk losses associated with multiple occurrences of generic bovine clinical mastitis (CM) within and across lactations. We studied 10,380 lactations from 5 large, high-producing dairy herds that used automatic recording of daily milk yields. Mixed models, with a random herd effect and an autoregressive covariance structure to account for repeated measurements, were used to quantify the effect of CM and other control variables (parity, week of lactation, other diseases) on milk yield. Many cows that developed CM were higher producers than their non-mastitic herdmates before CM occurred. Milk yield began to drop after diagnosis; the greatest loss occurred in the first weeks (up to 126 kg) and then gradually tapered to a constant value approximately 2 mo after CM. Mastitic cows often never recovered their potential yield. First-lactation cows lost 164 kg of milk for the first episode and 198 kg for the second in the 2 mo after CM diagnosis, compared with their potential yield. Among older cows, this estimate was 253 kg for the first, 238 kg for the second, and 216 kg for the third CM case. A cow that had 1 or more CM episodes in her previous lactation produced 1.2 kg/d less milk over the whole current lactation (95% confidence interval: 0.6, 1.7) than a cow without CM in her previous lactation. These findings provide dairy producers with information on the average milk loss associated with CM cases without considering the causative agent, and can be used for economic analysis.