AUTHOR=Raboisson Didier , Ferchiou Ahmed , Pinior Beate , Gautier Thomas , Sans Pierre , Lhermie Guillaume TITLE=The Use of Meta-Analysis for the Measurement of Animal Disease Burden: Losses Due to Clinical Mastitis as an Example JOURNAL=Frontiers in Veterinary Science VOLUME=7 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2020.00149 DOI=10.3389/fvets.2020.00149 ISSN=2297-1769 ABSTRACT=
The literature contains an extensive panel of studies focusing on the costs of animal diseases. The losses of an agriculture holding can be influenced by many factors since farming is a complex system and diseases are closely interrelated. Meta-analysis can be used to detect effects (i.e., change in clinical mastitis losses here) across studies and to identify factors that may influence those effects. This includes the external validity of the published study results with regard to the input parameters and the internal validity of the study, particularly how other diseases related to the target disease were accounted for. Mixed-effect meta-regressions were performed to estimate the mean clinical mastitis losses per case across the literature and to elucidate to what extent clinical mastitis losses are influenced by (i) general factors, such as etiology; (ii) the types of losses that contribute to the total mastitis losses; and (iii) prices. In total, 82 observations from nine studies were included in the meta-analysis to assess mean clinical mastitis losses per case. The multivariate meta-regression showed that etiology significantly influenced the clinical mastitis loss per case. The mean loss was determined to be €224 per case for all published etiologies. In detail, mean losses equalled €457 and €101 per case of clinical mastitis due to gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, respectively, and €428 and €74 per case of clinical mastitis due to