Coccidiosis

What are the true costs of an outbreak of disease?

We were asked to estimate the likely long-term costs of an outbreak of coccidiosis on a particular herd.

Aside from the obvious deaths, medicines and increased labour, we must consider all costs of an increased time to calving, and any effect on milk yield, and income.

This project used thousands of bodyweight records and millions of per-milking milk yield records to estimate the long-term effects of a coccidiosis outbreak. Robustly predicting these effects increased the likely costs by many multiples, to a range of estimates easily in six figures.