What about the bull? A systematic review about the role of males in bovine infectious infertility within cattle herds

Abstract

Numerous pathogens affect cow fertility. Nevertheless, little information has been published about microorganisms associated with cattle infertility focusing on bulls. The present review offers a current analysis and highlights potential key aspects on the relevance of bulls in the emergence of infertility problems of infectious origin within herds that are still not completely determined. The present systematic review was conducted using the PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases on December 9, 2022. In total, 2,224 bibliographic records were reviewed and, according to strict inclusion criteria, 38 articles were selected from 1966 to 2022, from which we ranked more than 27 different microorganisms (fungi were not identified). The most cited pathogens were BoHV (described by 26.3% of the papers), Campylobacter fetus (23.7%), Tritrichomonas foetus (18.4%), and BVDV, Ureaplasma spp., and Mycoplasma spp. (10.5% each). Despite the general trend towards an increasing number of publications about bull-infertility problems, a number of pathogens potentially transmitted through both natural breeding and seminal doses given to females and associated with infertility within herds were not ranked in the study (e.g., Chlamydia spp.). This work highlights i) the need to clearly establish the role of certain microorganisms not traditionally associated with reproductive problems in bull infertility (e.g., Staphylococcus spp. or BoHV-4) and ii) the need to perform additional studies on breeding bulls to clarify their role in infertility problems within herds. This would allow monitoring for pathogens that have gone unnoticed and those that are fastidious to diagnose and/or potentially transmitted to females.

Keywords: Breeding bulls; Cattle infertility; Infectious infertility; Systematic review.

Fig. 1

PRISMA flowchart of literature for the selection of papers included in the current study about bull infertility due to infectious causes.

Fig. 2

Temporal representation of the number of papers (Y axis) published per year (X axis). The continuous black line represents the line of regression.

Fig. 3

Commonly used techniques for microorganism identification. The continuous black line represents the number of papers (X axis) over time (Y axis) that used PCR as the diagnostic tool, the discontinuous gray line refers to indirect methods (different immunoassays), and the dotted black line refers to cultures and direct detection by microscopy.