Tom Fangman University of Missouri

Publish Date: June 3, 2006

Designing and communicating health strategies for herds of animals requires a very different approach than those used for individual animals. This fact sheet serves as an introduction to the herd health section of the Handbook and provides an overview of health maintenance and disease prevention strategies used to manage herds of animals. It provides fundamental terms commonly used to communicate health issues, reviews basic factors that confound disease diagnostics, and reviews techniques that can be used to estimate health and disease costs within populations of pigs.