The study was conducted with the objectives of assessing the current camel milk production, determining the prevalence, major Bacterial pathogens and associated risk factor of camel mastitis. For this study 100 households and 384 camels were selected randomly. Questionnaire survey was administered to camel holder households to collect data on management practices, knowledge of camel mastitis, treatment attempts and responses, extent of veterinary service delivery, and general information on production and reproduction performances of camels. Clinical examination, CMT and bacteriological culturing were performed to diagnose the occurrence of clinical and subclinical mastitis. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics and univariate logistic regression. GLM (General Linear Model) were used to examine the effect of mastitis, parity, and stage of lactation in camel milk yield. Mean milking frequency and mean lactation length was (3.03±0.731) times a day and (13.8 ± 0.19) months respectively. Diagnosis result of mastitis and stage of lactation had significant effect in milk yield (p<0.01). However across parity there was no statistically significant difference. Daily mean milk yield was higher (3.6 ± 0.09) in non mastitic camel than the mastitic once (2.3 ± 0.10). The results of CMT and bacteriological culture revealed that Clinical and sub-clinical mastitis were prevalent in 19 (4.9%) and 96 (25%) of the studied animals respectively. This gives an overall CMT based mastitis prevalence of 29.9% (95%CI: 24.93, 34.06) at animal level and 9.4% at quarter level. Additionally, 9 (2.3 %) camels were found with blind teats. The most important pathogens isolated from clinical and subclinical mastitis cases were S. aureus (6.6%), St. dysgalactiae (2.9%), Escherichia coli (2.2%), and S. aureus 38 (27.9%), St. Agalactiae 16 (11.7%) Escherichia coli (8.1%), Bacillus spp (6.6%) respectively. The univariate logistic regression showed that, among risk factors considered tick infestation (P<0.01), using ant-suckling device (P< 0.05), stage of lactation (P<0.01), and parity number (P<0.05) had significant effect in prevalence of overall mastitis.

Keywords: Bacterial pathogen Camelus Dromedarius, California Mastitis Test (CMT), Lactation Length, Milk Yield, Prevalence, Risk Factors