- Systematic surveillance of mastitis cases may help farmers and veterinarians identify patterns in infection rates, pinpoint environmental or management-related hotspots within herds or flocks, and detect emerging trends that may indicate changing pathogen profiles or antimicrobial resistance.
- Monitoring these trends over time may help the industry to implement targeted prevention strategies, improve farm management practices, and enhance both animal welfare and the economic sustainability of farming.
- Here we demonstrate our early work using real time data from a sentinel network of veterinary practices in Wales and text mining to monitor mastitis patterns over time in both cattle and sheep.
The interactive chart is based on nearly two years of data collected by FAVSNET and includes consultation data from 5 veterinary practices.
Free text narratives and drug labels written by the vet are searched for those that mention mastitis and spelling variations. Based on reading by a domain expert this search term is currently about 90% accurate.
Geographical location is based on the postcode of the affected farm.
You can get specific information on animal disease diagnosis from the UK APHA for both cattle and sheep.
If the view does not look good in your browser, please view directly on tableau public here.
The interactive chart above is based on nearly two years of data collected by FAVSNET and includes consultation data from 5 veterinary practices.
Free text narratives and drug labels written by vets are searched by a regular expression (regex) to identify those describing a probable episode of a mastitis. The search looks for the word “mastitis” excluding common negations such as “no sign of mastitis”, “no mastitis” or “mastitis vaccine”. Additionally, those narratives described as “farm prescription information” and “bulk milk analysis” are also excluded.
After manually reading a random sample of 200 of these records by a domain expert, some false positives (around 10%) remain due to narratives including cases of “previous mastitis” and other less common ways of discarding mastitis (“Ruled out mastitis”). Future updates of this dashboard will include a revised regular expressions aimed to improve the accuracy of the search.
Regions on the map are created from mapping farm post codes to NUTS3 regions. To ensure anonymity, geographical granularity was further restricted to four regions : North Wales (UKL11, UKL12 and UKL13), Mid Wales (UKL14, UKL18, UKL24), South Wales (UKL17, UKL22 but not represented here due to the lack of cases) and West Midlands (UKG11:13, UKG21:24, UKG31:33 and UKG36:39).
We present two visualisations of time; (1) total cases by month and (2) relative frequency in each month in relation to all consults on that same month.
The interactive nature of the chart allows users to explore data by species (by using the specific filter) or by geographical region by clicking on each region on the map. This will change the plots on the right to show only the selected records.