Improving beef calf health: frequency of disease syndromes, uptake of management practices following calving, and potential for antimicrobial use reduction in western Canadian herds
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Bovine respiratory disease (BRD), calf diarrhea (CD), and navel infections are the most commonly reported diseases of western Canadian beef calves. The objectives of this study were to estimate the frequency of treatment for these diseases for specific age cohorts and identify potential opportunities for reducing antimicrobial use. Producers representing 89 western Canadian cow-calf herds completed a survey describing calfhood diseases and management. The most common reason for calf treatment before weaning was BRD (4.9%), and BRD treatment was described in 51% of reporting herds before 2 months of age. Calf diarrhea (2.9%) and navel infection (2.0%) were the second and third most common reasons for treatment. Most calves were treated for CD between 6 days and 1 month of age. Almost one in five herds reported routinely administering antimicrobials at birth. Calving heifers and cows together were all associated with an increased treatment risk for BRD in calves from birth to 2 months (OR 3.55, 95%CI 2.13–5.94, P < 0.0001), CD from 1 month to weaning (OR 3.94, 95%CI 1.29–12.0, P = 0.02), and navel infection (OR 4.55, 95%CI 1.78–11.6, P = 0.002). Failure to sort cow-calf pairs out of the calving area was also associated with an increased treatment risk for BRD from 4 months to weaning (OR 4.89, 95%CI 1.96–12.2, P = 0.0006) and CD from 24 h to 5 days (OR 2.82, 95%CI 1.03–7.75, P = 0.04), and not using the Sandhills system was associated with an increased treatment risk for navel infection (OR 4.55, 95%CI 1.78–11.6, P = 0.002). Other potentially modifiable factors associated with an increased risk of BRD in calves from birth to 2 months were winter feeding and calving in one area (P < 0.0001), heifers calving in a higher density area (P = 0.01), and an increasing number of times cow-calf pairs were gathered before turn out to summer pasture (P = 0.0005). The purchase of any cows during the calving or prebreeding period was associated with an increased risk of BRD from birth to 2 months (P < 0.0001) and from 2 to 4 months (P < 0.0001). A history of respiratory bacterin vaccines administered to the dams was associated with a decreased risk of BRD in calves from 4 months to weaning (P = 0.01). Cows calving in a higher density area was associated with an increased risk of CD from 1 month to weaning (P = 0.02). These practices present opportunities for investigation of approaches to disease management that could support the judicious use of antimicrobials.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it