Evaluation of the Seasonality of Veterinary Lameness Treatments in UK Dairy Cattle

Lameness is one of the most important diseases of dairy cattle (Kossaibati and Esslemont, 1997; on welfare grounds it is perhaps the most important disease of the modern dairy cow (Webster, 2001). We need to better understand the relative importance of the main factors influence its prevalence in order to develop better preventative regimes. One particular area of importance is to establish whether different diseases have different risk factors, for example research in New Zealand (Chesterton 2004) has shown that sole and white line lesions have different underlying causes (and require different foci when developing preventative regimes), yet in housed systems white line disease and sole ulcer are not separated when control programmes are developed.
The objective of this report is to use the National Animal Disease Information Service (NADIS) database, which is derived from reports by veterinary practitioners, to evaluate the seasonality of veterinary treatments for the four ...