They may be no visible signs externally in terms of looking at the udder or
touching the udder, palpitating the udder.
But we do see oftentimes flakes or clots in the milk.
So as you strip the milk out of the tit, there's usually some flakes or clots.
So as the milk compositions change a little bit, and you're getting this,
instead of a nice fluid coming out, there are a few flakes or
clots coming out in the milk.
And sometimes, on occasion, the milk may have an off color to it.
Let's go to the next slide.
So, this is an example you have to look very carefully.
Right at the end of these red arrows here are a couple of examples of the flakes or
clots in milk that you would find.
And so typically, when if you're using something called a strip cup or
something like that.
Milk is white, the flakes are going to be white and
typically these things are black.
Sometimes people strip it out on a black mat under the cow.
Again you can very clearly and easily see these flakes or clots coming out.
Fairly typical for mastitis subacute mastitis, a fairly mild inflammation.
Let's go ahead and start looking at now at the acute mastitis.
Just a little bit higher level in terms of the syndromes.
Sudden onset, moderate to severe inflammation of the udder, so
you can actually palpate something.
You can see the udder is perhaps, feel that it's hot, it's warmer than the rest
of the udder or the rest of the quarters, it's red, it's very touchy.
The cow might try to kick you or something if you try to touch it.
So there are signs in the udder.
Fairly visible signs and clear signs that there's something going on there.
Decreased milk production and serous milk and, fiber and clots.
So we do get those flakes or clots.
But even sometimes worse than that.
So let's go to the next slide and see an example.
This is a heifer with mastitis and clearly this particular quarter
has an inflammation in it compared to the other quarter here.
So that's an acute mastitis issue than this particular heifer,
absolutely no question about it.
This is a pretty obvious one here.
Next slide, and again this idea of the serous milk, if it gets really bad,
you get this real stringy kind of milk, and kind of serous fluid.
So the organic components start separating out from the water component of milk and
so again, fairly typical of acute mastitis.
So the next level of severity, the next syndrome,
next level of severity of clinical mastitis is called peracute mastitis.
Again, very sudden onset, very severe inflammation of the mammary gland,
serous milk.
And a lot of times, you get, although you do get systemic
responses like increased respiration, or increased rectal temperature.
Those kinds of things in the animal.
This is particularly significant here.
Significant systemic responses.
A really sick cow, even to the point of where they might die.
So this is kind of the top end in terms of severity
of mastitis in terms of the peracute syndrome.
So our fourth type of clinical mastitis syndrome is chronic mastitis.
This starts to get a little bit kind of in between the clinical and
subclinical because it basically goes back and forth.
So, typically the infection or
inflammation persist in the mammary gland as a subclinical mastitis.
We'll get to that here in just a moment.
Again, there are no external signs.
Not necessarily flakes or clots in the milk.
There will be an increase to somatic cell count, but unless you test for that,
you really can't see, otherwise.
And this can persist for months to years, and
then periodic flare ups in the clinical.
So it might be acute or even sometimes peracute, but usually acute or subacute.
So she'd be going along very nicely for a while, subclinical mastitis,
elevated somatic cell count.
And then all of a sudden,
we'll have a clinical episode that would lead a clear up, she'll be treated.
Go back to being subclinical and then fire up, and so on, and so forth.
So chronic mastitis is again, just kind of switching back and
forth between these two types of two different syndromes of mastitis.
So final type of or final syndrome of mastitis that we're going to talk about is
something called subclinical.
And so here again, there are no gross inflammation,
you really can't see the change in the mammary gland.
No gross changes in the milk that you can see again,
what you find is that there's an increase level of somatic cells.
So let's take a look at that.