The Prevalence, Coexistence, and Correlations between Seven Pathogens Detected by a PCR Method from South-Western Poland Dairy Cattle Suffering from Bovine Respiratory Disease

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is a very important disease that contributes to economic losses in dairy and beef cattle breeding worldwide. The molecular testing of material from 296 calves showing BRD symptoms from 74 dairy herds located in south-western Poland was performed in 2019-2021. Molecular tests were performed using a commercial kit VetMAX (TM) Ruminant Respiratory Screening Kit (Thermo Fisher Scientific) for the simultaneous detection of genetic material of seven pathogens responsible for BRD. At least one pathogen was detected in 95.95% of herds. The overall prevalence was: Pasteurella multocida 87.84%, Mannheimia haemolytica 44.59%, bovine coronavirus (BcoV) 32.43%, Mycoplasma bovis 29.73%, Histophilus somni 28.38%, bovine parainfluenza virus type 3 (BPIV-3) 13.51%, and bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) 10.81%. Twenty-nine configurations of pathogen occurrences were found. Bacterial infections were the most frequently recorded as 56.7% of all results. Coinfections mainly consisted of two pathogens. Not a single purely viral coinfection was detected. The most frequent result was a single P. multocida infection accounting for 18.31% of all results. The statistically significant correlation (p = 0.001) with the highest strength of effect (phi 0.38) was between M. bovis and H. somni.

Automated summary

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is a significant disease in dairy and beef cattle breeding, causing economic losses. Molecular testing of 296 calves with BRD symptoms from 74 dairy herds in southwestern Poland revealed that at least one pathogen was detected in 95.95% of the herds.