A new published article has shown how the microbial environment in the uterus of cows alters in the development of Clinical Endometritis. These interesting results show that Healthy cows have a diverse population of bacteria present in their uterus at 30 days post calving. Subclinical Endometritis cows  had more Acinetobacter and Lactobacillus present and Clinical Endometritis cows had Fusobacterium, Trueperella and Peptoniphilus as predominant species.

This confirms that Gram positive, anaerobic bacteria exist in the unhealthy uterus of dairy cows, which is important to know when choosing antimicrobial therapies. The authors review a lot of previous work on the species variations as endometritis develops but propose that in the future, more work should concentrate on looking at how those species interact to produce such dramatic population changes.

This work was carried out in China, on 38 cows from an 800-cow dairy. Cows treated with antimicrobials were excluded from the study and all cows in the study were of comparable parity and body condition score. Samples were taken at 30 days post calving from the uterus and DNA analysis techniques were used to identify species. This fascinating new paper is from Wang et. al. (2018), Frontiers in Microbiology, 9:2691 doi 10.3389/fmicb.2018.02691