Sanitary conditions of lactating dromedary she-camel environment with special reference to milk quality and subclinical mastitis monitoring

The present study was concerned with 42 dwellings of lactating dromedary she-camels in owner's houses which distributed in 6 different villages around Assiut city, Egypt; to be representative to camel distribution in villages of Manfalout, El-kousia, El-Fateh, Abnob, Abo-Tig and Sedfa. This study was unlike most studies that deal with camels in the nomadic life while here all animals were traditionally managed and were housed in each dwelling. The environmental conditions around animals were estimated microbiologically to evaluate the hygiene of their habitat and to estimate milk quality and also to monitor subclinical mastitis. Therefore, different random samples of air, soil, water, milkers' hands, milk equipments, composite milk and bulk milk samples were collected. It was found wide varieties of a total 599 of pathogenic and potentially pathogenic isolates could be detected and identified in which soil samples had the highest number as 208, while composite milk samples had the lowest as 20. As the milk was subjected to the surrounding environment, the isolates were elevated to 113 as explained by the significance correlation of total bacterial count between bulk milk and soil. Although all animals were observed as clinically healthy with apparently normal udder, the CMT showed 9.52% was positive for subclinical mastitis. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]