A retrospective study of respiratory disease in a cohort of bacon pigs. I. Clinico-epidemiological analyses.

Previous studies of respiratory disease problems in pig herds have to a large extent relied on mortality data and slaughterhouse findings. The present report deals with simultaneously recorded clinical data and post mortem information for individual pigs from a large herd. Among other things, the results suggest that the commonly applied treatments of clinical cases have limited effect, that routine meat inspection is a fairly sensitive tool in monitoring the disease status, that productivity is affected relatively more by clinical episodes than by subclinical occurrence, and that respiratory disease and diarrhea are interrelated in more than one way.