An index for multidimensional assessment of swine health.

Abstract

Pork accounts for almost one-third of the meat consumed worldwide. Infectious diseases have a marked impact on pig production. Epidemiological indicators are considered the most useful criteria in decision-making; however, a health status assessment remains a challenge at the national and regional levels. This study proposes a health index including herd-losses, morbidity, fatality, and type of diseases, to rate the health situation in a region or country; it contributes to assessing the effectiveness of control, damage manifestation, and trends. It is a multidimensional index with a structure of triads and simple quantitative, semi-quantitative, and qualitative expressions that use flexible and dynamics limits. With it, we analyzed twenty-one countries in 2005–2018, focusing on African swine fever, classical swine fever, foot-mouth-disease, and porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome, diseases that caused 72% of the morbidity. Our multidimensional approach estimates farm, local, and regional impact from infectious agents and outbreaks, and apprises trends aiming to be useful to control measures, strategic actions, and animal health policies.