Mastitis causes substantial losses through reduced milk production, treatment costs, premature culling, and compromised animal welfare due to pain and discomfort. 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
- 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
- Enhance both animal welfare and the economic sustainability of farming.
The early work of the Farm Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (FAVSNET) researching mastitis has involved using real-time data. This comes from a sentinel network of veterinary practices in Wales and text mining to monitor mastitis patterns over time in both cattle and sheep.
Data processing
- 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” and spelling variations, excluding common negations such as “no sign of mastitis”, “no mastitis” or “mastitis vaccine”. 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, for example “ruled out mastitis”.
Dashboard
The interactive chart below is based on nearly two years of data collected by FAVSNET and includes consultation data from five veterinary practices.
If the view does not look good in your browser, we recommend viewing the dashboard directly on Tableau.
We present two visualisations of time:
- Total cases by month
- Relative frequency in each month in relation to all consults in that same month.
The interactive nature of the chart allows you to explore data by species, 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.
Regions on the map are created from mapping the post codes of affected farms to Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 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)
- West Midlands (UKG11:13, UKG21:24, UKG31:33 and UKG36:39).
Future updates of this dashboard will include a revised regular expression, designed to further enhance the accuracy of the search.
Disease surveillance information for cattle and sheep is also available from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA).