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New ways to preserve claw health - comparative study on the efficacy of antibiotics and antibiotic-free treatments for digital dermatitis (Mortellaro disease)
Project
Project code: A/15/21
Contract period: 01.04.2015
- 31.03.2017
Budget: 108,320 Euro
Purpose of research: Experimental development
Digital dermatitis (DD) is an international problem on beef and dairy farms. Damaged and infected skin shows erosive and painful open lesions. The typical defect is located on the hind legs at the coronary band. More than 80 % of German dairy farmers have to deal with DD on their farms. Due to the high number of infected animals, a lot of drugs are in use. Tetracyclines are commonly used treatments. After topical treatment judged effective by positive clinical evaluation many relapses occur throughout the herds, supposedly caused by encysted Treponema in the epidermal layers. To reduce the amount of dispensed drugs it is necessary to find an effective, pain reducing and sustainable treatment without a large pharmacological input into the environment.
In preparation for the study all data on claw health was collected on several Bavarian dairy farms during the routine trim to get the individual disease history of every cow. Based on this dataset the cows were randomly split into different treatment groups.
Five different superficial treatments are compared in this study. An antibiotic (chlortetracycline spray), different antibiotic-free treatments (salicylic acid, polyurethane bandage, copper-chelate spray) and a combination thereof (chlortetracycline spray + polyurethane bandage) are used. The study is innovative in performing three biopsies on the lesions during the healing process and comparing the success of each treatment histologically. This way, not only the effect on the surface of the lesions, but also the effect on the bacteria in deeper tissue layers can be evaluated. The main questions to be solved in this study are whether antibiotic-free products have the same positive effect on the eradication of bacteria as the known effect of an antibiotic treatment. Is there a reduction or elimination of Treponema in the tissue and how deep is the effect of a superficial treatment of DD?
Due to the need for an appropriate treatment of DD on cattle farms and the reduction of applied antibiotics, these questions have to be solved.
Section overview
Subjects
- Animal health
