Prevalence of infectious diseases on dairy farms classified on the basis of their biosecurity score
Published Online: Mar 01, 2022
Page range: 103 - 107
Received: Jul 09, 2021
Accepted: Jan 31, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jvetres-2022-0006
Keywords
© 2022 L. Perillo et al. published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Introduction
The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between biosecurity as scored on the Italian National Animal Welfare Reference Centre (Centro di Referenza Nazionale per il Benessere Animale – CReNBA) checklist and the prevalence of
Material and Methods
The checklist was used to assign an animal welfare score to 31 dairy farms. Twenty-one farms with a moderate score (>33%, <66%) formed group 1, and 10 farms with a high score (>66%) were group 2. Blood samples were collected from all cows on each farm to investigate the titres of antibodies against the relevant pathogens. Two-way analysis of variance was applied to assess differences between the two experimental groups and the Mann–Whitney test was applied to evaluate prevalence differences in the tested parasites between the groups.
Results
All tested farms had a score that classified them as either good or excellent. A higher incidence of
Conclusion
The CReNBA checklist represents an impartial, reproducible, functional and smart instrument based on risk analysis and assigns a farm a mathematical animal welfare score. Among the parasites tested for, only