الكاتب: Multiple References

Veterinary medicine, its teaching, and hence its application, has been steeped for centuries in well-ordered classification of disease . Thus textbooks elegantly pass from `aetiology' to `pathogenesis', from `clinical signs' to 'treatment' often giving only token obeisance to `epidemiology' and strategic preventative measures. Physiology and pathophysiology, however, are dynamic phenomena and require a corresponding flexibility of thought, unhampered by the rigid interpretation of linear clinical sequences . Nowhere is this more pertinent than when considering the ovine udder in function and dysfunction . It can be argued that there is but a single udder disease in sheep, any differences in clinical manifestation being a question of degree. Thus it is likely that there is a continual Type of disease Clinical mastitis (ewe ill, udder inflamed) Recovery Subclinical mastitis (ewe well, but disease present in the udder which may feel hard or lumpy) Table I The cost of mastitis shift in the status of individual udders from health to disease and vice versa. To date, studies on sheep mastitis have tended to concentrate upon either the bacteriology of the disease or the discussion of clinical cases. In reality, this approach only reveals the `tip of the iceberg' and does not readily translate into practical terms .