THERAPEUTIC EVALUATION OF AN OUT OF THE BOX ORAL NON-ANTIBIOTIC FORMULATION AGAINST CLINICAL MASTITIS IN BUFFALOS

Mastitis is regarded as most economically important disease of dairy animals in Pakistan. The cure rate of mastitis with use of antibiotics/antibacterials is often quite poor. In addition, use of these agents leads to undesirable residues in milk and poses several problems to milk processing industry. Therefore, measures other than the use of antibiotics/antibacterials are being investigated to improve mastitis cure rate and to circumvent the problem. Keeping these considerations in view, the current study was planned to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of a non-antibiotic, non-proprietary antibacterial preparation for the treatment of clinical bubaline mastitis. For this purpose, buffaloes (n=40) suffering with clinical mastitis were selected and randomly divided into two equal groups viz. group I and group II. The animals of group I (n=20) were treated with combination of trisodium citrate (TSC; 40 g), vitamin C (10 g), zinc sulphate (3 g) and copper sulphate (1 g) for 7 days. Group II (n=20) was treated with routine mastitis therapy i.e. tylosin at dose rate of 10 mg/kg, I/M along with amoxicillin & clavulanic acid combination at total dosage of 600 mg I/mm infusion daily for 5 days. The efficacy of the treatment was evaluated based on grading of improvement, surf field mastitis test (SFMT) scores and microbiological examination. Regarding grading of improvement, 50% animals of group I recovered clinically while corresponding value for group II was 45%. The SFMT based cure rates for clinical mastitis in groups I and II were 70.21% and 72.09%, respectively. Administration of allocated treatments to the buffaloes affected with clinical mastitis led to a quarter based bacteriological cure rate of 66.67% in group I and 65.12% in group II. It was concluded that administration of non-antibiotic, non-proprietary formulation containing trisodium citrate, vitamin C, zinc sulphate and copper sulphate resulted in almost equivalent therapeutic results in buffaloes affected with clinical mastitis compared to antibiotic therapy.