Risk factors associated with diarrhoea in newborn calves

Abstract

A prospective study was carried out on 94 randomly selected beef calf herds in the Midi-Pyrénées region in France in order to determine neonatal gastroenteritis risk factors. A total of 3,080 newborn calves was enrolled from December 1995 to April 1996. By using a specific statistical analysis method that takes into account an 'intra-herd' correlation, our final model allows the identification of approximately 20 management risk factors associated with diarrhoea. We confirmed several factors identified previously (calving conditions) and estimated some new factors (month of birth). Several herd level factors were found to be significantly associated with the risk of diarrhoea. These factors included herd management conditions such as hygiene (cleaning, relative risk (RR) = 1.9), and also vitamin or salt supplements to animals and cow vaccination (RR = 2). It was found amongst the calf level factors, that calving conditions and dyspnea were associated with diarrhoea. Dam vaccination seemed to protect calves against illness. A relationship between diarrhoea and the month of birth was also observed. Our results confirmed that calf diarrhoea is a multifactor pathology and prevention should be considered globally within the farm.