Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is a multifactorial disease that challenges the US dairy industry with negative impact on calf health and welfare before and after weaning. Despite the current advances in vaccines and therapeutic agents, BRD continues to be a great burden with significant animal health, welfare and economic consequences The complex etiology and numerous factors associated with BRD call for a herd-specific approach for BRD prevention and control.
The BRD Risk application takes a comprehensive approach for BRD control and prevention providing decision makers several tools including the California (CA) BRD Scoring System for preweaned calves, the prevalence estimation tool, and finally the BRD Risk Assessment tool.
The CA BRD Scoring system is a validated scoring system to identify BRD score positive preweaned dairy calves. The prevalence estimation tool can be used to assess a random sample of preweaned dairy calves for BRD and report the prevalence of BRD score positive calves and its level of certainty as 95% confidence interval. The BRD Risk Assessment tool allows decision makers to assess a comprehensive list of risk factors across different management practices related to BRD. The risk assessment questions that identify risk scores are each followed by an entry field for planned interventions that are summarized in a final report that can be shared by email. The final report also contrasts the herd scores, overall and stratified by management area, against a reference cohort of herds with known BRD risk. All methods used in developing the BRD Risk application have been published (see References in About section). The BRD Risk is also available in multiple languages.