Duration: 2025 - 2026
People involved: Laura da Silva, Luís Pedro Gomes do Carmo, Agathe Verhulst, Reda Zahri
Health in livestock is often considered as the absence of disease. This disease-centric view overlooks the many biological, environmental, social and economic factors that affect the health of livestock. For human public health, such complexity is captured by the “Determinants of Health (DoH)” models but an equivalent framework is still missing for livestock.
The project “What is a healthy dairy cow?” aims to move beyond the traditional, disease-centered view of animal health and develop a Determinants of Health model for dairy cows.
We first use artificial intelligence methods, including natural language processing and large language models to mine scientific literature and map the wide range of factors associated with dairy cow health. Building on this, we work with key stakeholders in the dairy sector: in semi-structured interviews, farmers and dairy health experts co-define what “dairy cow / herd health” means in practice and identify the most important factors that support or compromise it. In the next step, a causal-network exercise aims to group indicators into meaningful determinants and explore how these factors interact.
Together, these steps lead to a stakeholder validated DoH model for dairy cows. In the longer term, the model aims to provide a basis for more holistic surveillance and management strategies and to shift current practice towards more system-oriented perspectives on dairy cow health, moving beyond the prevailing disease-centric paradigm.
