DIAGNOSTICS OF CONTAGIOUS AGALACTIA IN HUNGARY

Contagious agalactia is not endemic in Hungary. Apart fi om the occurr ence reported here, there has been only one outbreak of the disease 50 years ago when it was successfully eradicated by stamping out. In the summer of 1997 there was also a mass outbreak on one farm among 200 m other goats and 500 ewes where in the course of one month about 150 an imals got ill. The sick animals developed keratoconjunctivitis (Fig.1) often leading to blindness, polyarthritis that caused lameness and do wner syndrome (Fig. 2 and 3), and interstitial mastitis that led to at rophy of the udder. The clinical symptoms were suggestive of a disease of mycoplasmal origin. Other bacterial, chlamydial, and viral aetiolo gical agents have been eliminated from the differential diagnostic pos sibilities by routine diagnostic methods. The presence of Mycoplasma i n synovial fluid of the ill animals (Fig.4) was confirmed by PCR (Fig. 5). Mycoplasma were cultured from the synovial, tear and milk samples taken from a total of 14 animals. Based on their biochemical characte ristics and the results of growth inhibition test with positive sera ( Table 2) the isolates were identified as Mycoplasma agalactiae. After sequencing, the 270 base-pair long PCR product gained from the Mycopla sma monoculture proved to be 100% identical with the corresponding gen e sequence of M.agalactiae coding the 16S ribosomal RNA. Consequently the diagnosis of contagious agalactia was established and the affected herd stamped out.