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Monday, 07/12/2010 8:56:04 AM

Monday, July 12, 2010 8:56:04 AM

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New mastitis treatment may offer alternative to

The important part of this for me was the current market for antibiotics for mastis. I have seen this 40-50 million number before. Of course the market ICCC is going for is sub-clinical mastis, which is potentially larger and has no treatment for.

New mastitis treatment may offer alternative to antibiotics
Agricultural Research, Feb, 2006 by Jan Suszkiw

A new weapon could be on tap for fighting bacteria that cause mastitis, an inflammatory udder disease of dairy cows costing around $2 billion annually in animal and milk-production losses.

In trials at ARS's Bovine Functional Genomics Laboratory, Beltsville, Maryland, scientists Max Paape and Douglas Bannerman showed that injecting the cows' mammary glands with the sugar Poly-x reduced mastitis infections at about one-twelfth the cost of antibiotics.

The sugar, a type known as a "polysaccharide," occurs naturally in the cell walls of certain yeasts. But when administered to nonlactating ("dry") dairy cows, the polysaccharide serves as a kind of biochemical bugle call that mobilizes the animals' immune system, especially to produce bacteria-killing 1 white blood cells.

"Previous work at Beltsville indicated that increasing the cell count in milk will prevent infection," says Paape, a dairy scientist. "Poly-x increases the cell count in dry-cow secretions for the first 5 days of the dry period, thus preventing infection by bacteria."

Today's mastitis-control programs often use several measures, like diagnostic testing, sanitation, herd separation, animal culling, teat dips, and antibiotic treatment. For conventional dairy operations, antibiotics use can be expensive, costing about $10 a cow, or $45 million nationwide, Paape estimates. The practice is also controversial, with concerns focusing on the potential for environmental contamination and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Paape and Bannerman see some advantages to using Poly-x as a natural alternative--the lack of residues being one. Another is the expense. A tube of antibiotic costs around $2.50. By comparison, the ingredient cost for an experimental Poly-x treatment is only 20 cents.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3741/is_2_54/ai_n16069030/
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