**6. Role of mastitis on public health**

Mastitis is increasingly becoming a public health concern due to the ability of the causative bacterial pathogens and/or their products, such as enterotoxins, to

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**Author details**

**7. Conclusions**

Oudessa Kerro Dego

Agriculture, Knoxville, TN, USA

\*Address all correspondence to: okerrode@utk.edu

provided the original work is properly cited.

Department of Animal Science, The University of Tennessee, Institute of

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Staphylococcus aureus*, *Streptococcus uberis*, and *Escherichia coli*.

*Bovine Mastitis: Part I*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93483*

or if these pathogens make it through processing.

enter the food supply and cause foodborne diseases [109, 162], especially through the consumption of raw milk [29] and undercooked meat of culled dairy cows due to chronic mastitis that are usually sold to the slaughter (abattoir) for meat consumption. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that roughly 48 million people in the United States a year become sick from foodborne diseases [163]. Foodborne pathogens have been detected in bulk tank milk in multiple studies [164–167]. These authors found that the number of foodborne pathogens detected in bulk tank milk vary with location, management practices, hygiene, and number of animals on the farm [165]. Similarly, a study on bulk tank milk from east Tennessee and southwest Virginia by Rohrbach et al. [168] showed that 32.5% of the samples analyzed contained one or more foodborne pathogens. Even dairy producers who used proper hygienic milking practices, pre- and post-milking teat disinfectant and antibiotic dry cow therapy, had foodborne pathogens in their bulk tank milk [164]. The isolation of these foodborne pathogens from bulk tank milk samples across the United States demonstrate the threat that mastitis pathogens and zoonotic mastitis causing pathogens create on public health if raw milk is consumed

Bovine mastitis is the most important multifactorial disease of dairy cattle throughout the world. Mastitis is responsible for huge economic losses to the dairy producers and milk processing industry due to reduced milk production, alterations in milk composition, discarded milk, increased replacement costs, extra labor, treatment costs, and veterinary services. Many factors including pathogen, host, and environment can influence the development of mastitis. Mastitis, the inflammation of the mammary gland is usually a consequence of adhesion, invasion, and colonization of the mammary gland by one or more mastitis pathogens such as
