Joint Models to Predict Dairy Cow Survival from Sensor Data Recorded during the First Lactation.

Early predictions of cows' probability of survival to different lactations would help farmers in making successful management and breeding decisions. For this purpose, this research explored the adoption of joint models for longitudinal and survival data in the dairy field. An algorithm jointly modelled daily first-lactation sensor data (milk yield, body weight, rumination time) and survival data (i.

An end to endemic disease on farm?

The Animal Health and Welfare Pathway, which is set to launch in 2022, aims to reduce endemic disease in livestock by creating an all-encompassing approach to health and welfare, with vets at the heart. Here, Josh Loeb speaks to Jonathan Statham and Michael Seals about how this initiative will work.

Milk losses and dynamics during perturbations in dairy cows differ with parity and lactation stage.

Milk yield dynamics during perturbations reflect how cows respond to challenges. This study investigated the characteristics of 62,406 perturbations from 16,604 lactation curves of dairy cows milked with an automated milking system at 50 Belgian, Dutch, and English farms. The unperturbed lactation curve representing the theoretical milk yield dynamics was estimated with an iterative procedure fitting a model on the daily milk yield data that was not part of a perturbation.

Productive life span and resilience rank can be predicted from on-farm first-parity sensor time series but not using a common equation across farms.

A dairy cow's lifetime resilience and her ability to recalve gain importance on dairy farms, as they affect all aspects of the sustainability of the dairy industry. Many modern farms today have milk meters and activity sensors that accurately measure yield and activity at a high frequency for monitoring purposes. We hypothesized that these same sensors can be used for precision phenotyping of complex traits such as lifetime resilience or productive life span.

Updated good practice recommendations for outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT) in adults and children in the UK.

UK good practice recommendations for outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT) were published in 2012 and 2015 for adult and paediatric patients, respectively. Here we update the initial good practice recommendations in a combined document based on a further review of the OPAT literature and an extensive consultation process. As with the previous good practice recommendations, these updated recommendations are intended to provide pragmatic guidance for new and established OPAT services across a range of settings and to act as a set of quality indicators for service evaluation and quality improvement.