Characteristics of mammary secretions collected from infected and uninfected primigravid dairy heifer mammary glands.

Intramammary infections (IMI) in primigravid dairy heifers can affect mammary growth and development, which can reduce first-lactation milk yield. Detection of IMI in heifers most often involves the use of culture-based methods that are not often used in production dairy settings given their labor- and time-consuming nature. The objective of this study was to determine whether mammary secretion somatic cell count (SCC) and viscosity were associated with the infection status of primigravid heifer mammary glands. A total of 270 heifers from a single farm were used, selected based on the farmer's willingness to participate. The study was conducted from June to October 2020. Mammary secretion samples were aseptically collected from a randomly selected quarter of each heifer at 75 d prepartum (75PP), and another quarter of each heifer was sampled at 35 d prepartum (35PP). The remaining 2 quarters of each heifer were not examined. Mammary secretion samples underwent bacteriological examination to determine IMI status and quantitative SCC measurement and were also assessed for secretion viscosity based on visual observation. Prevalence of IMI was 26% (69/270) and 28% (71/255) at 75 and 35 d prepartum, respectively. Uninfected secretion samples had 133.2 [95% confidence interval (CI): 16.8 to >999.9] times greater odds to be thick compared with samples infected with a major pathogen, and 14.4 (95% CI: 8.5 to 24.1) times greater odds to be thick compared with samples infected with non-aureus staphylococci (NAS). The mean secretion SCC of uninfected quarters (6.04 ± 0.03 log

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© 2022, The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. and Fass Inc. on behalf of the American Dairy Science Association®. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).