13 udder health and milk quality experts from 10 different EU countries met in Gdansk, Poland.
The goal was to get to know Polish dairy production, to intensively exchange udder health and milk quality related knowledge between EU countries and to emphasize communalities. The European Mastitis Panel (EMP) is an initiative of MSD Animal Health and is a group of experienced Udder Health experts from 10 different EU countries, that met this year for their 10th yearly meeting.
The dairy in Poland, now the 5th largest EU milk producing country, is developing at an amazing speed since the political changes in 1989. Although 70% of the 234.000 Polish dairy farms has between 1-9 cows, the EMP visited one of Poland largest and best farms, 1100 cows producing 11.500 kg of milk per lactation, clearly above the Polish average of 8000 kg. A second 135 cow farm, with a more average milk production clearly had an opportunity for improvement for milk production and udder health. The young ambitious local veterinarian told the EU experts about his mastitis control program to optimize udder health management.
The EMP has also started a collaborative research project. The goal is to find out correlations between geno- and phenotypic data of 240 strains of the major mastitis pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, collected from 10 different EU countries. Final results of this research will be presented at the next EMP meeting in Hungary in May, 2018 in Budapest.
