Epidemiologische Untersuchungen - Stiftung Tierärztliche ...

8. Summary
Carl-Philip Dickhaus
200
Epidemiological analysis and classification of the health status of pig herds – developing
and validating a Herd Health Score (HHS)
The health status of animals, which are kept on farms for food production, has become an
increasing matter of public concern. For improving the husbandry systems towards better
health and welfare conditions as well as towards reducing drug consumptions, the
quantification of the heard health and indicators such as mortality, morbidity and the use of
antibiotics is one of the major preconditions. Regarding the fact that data on the health status
of slaughter animals has to be part of the food chain information to provide the required
efficient risk assessment, it is essential to be able to quantify the health of food producing
animal herds.
The objective is to develop, evaluate and validate a robust tool for quantifying the health
status of batches of slaughter pigs and in consequence pig herds.
Within 377 inspections 16,086 pigs, which were separated into 60 groups being fattened on
19 farms of a cooperative, have been clinically examined. The first of the repeated clinical
inspections was made three weeks after introducing the new stock, and the last examination
took place just a few days before slaughtering the individual batches of fattening pigs. In this
way each slaughter pig was examined at least six times over the whole rearing period.
The incidence and duration of the six criteria “respiratory diseases”, “diarrhea”, “limb
lesions”, “skin diseases”, “cannibalism” and “evenness of weight gain within the pig group”
have been measured and validated, so that each examination resulted in additive “health
points”, which can range from 0 to 14 points.
At the time of slaughtering the additive health points, generated during the six examinations,
were combined to one cumulative “Batch Health Point”, which presents the average of the
single inspections. These batch health points of batches from one single farmer were again
combined to a “herd health point”.