Respiratory disease causes 60 to 90 percent of the morbidity or sickness in feedlot cattle, Dr. Bill Pinchak says. Diagnosis is a challenge and primarily relies on visual appraisal to determine illness. This can vary by degrees of individual experience in diagnosing. “Typically, the accuracy is about 60 percent. So there are a lot of animals that are not diagnosed and end up being poor performers — or die,” he said.
Source: Drovers CattleNetwork, June 1, 2017.
By employing a combination of radio frequency identification tags and receivers with integrated statistical analysis and modeling, we have been able to detect morbidity based on changes in feeding behavior of cattle anywhere from two to four days earlier than visual clinical diagnosis.”