Incidences of and genetic parameters for mastitis, claw disorders, and common health traits recorded in dairy cattle contract herds

Test-day records for protein yield, protein percent, fat percent and somatic cell score combined with diagnoses for health traits from 19,870 Holstein cows kept in 9 large-scale contract herds in the region of Thuringia, Germany, were used to infer genetic parameters. From an electronic database system for recording diagnoses, 15 health disorders with highest incidences were extracted and grouped into the following 5 disease categories: claw disorders, mastitis, female fertility, metabolism, and ectoparasites. In a bayesian approach, threshold methodology was applied for binary distributed health disorders and linear models were used for gaussian test-day observations. Variances and variance ratios for health disorders were from univariate and covariance components among health disorders and between health disorders, and test-day production traits were from bivariate repeatability models. Incidences of health disorders increased with increasing parity and were substantially higher at the beginning of lactation. Only incidences for ectoparasites slightly increased with increasing stage of lactation. Heritabilities ranged from 0.00 for ectoparasites to 0.22 for interdigital hyperplasia. Heritabilities of remaining health disorders were in a narrow range between 0.04 (corpus luteum persistent) and 0.09 (dermatitis digitalis). Clustering diseases into categories did not result in higher heritabilities. The variance ratio of the permanent environmental component was higher than the heritability for the same trait, pointing to the conclusion that non-genetic factors influence repeated occurrence of health problems during lactation. Repeatabilities were relatively high with values up to 0.49 for interdigital hyperplasia. Genetic correlations among selected health disorders were low and close to zero, disproving the assumption that a cow being susceptible for a specific disease is also susceptible for other types of health disorders. Antagonistic genetic relationships between test-day protein yield and health disorders were found for ovarian cysts (0.57) and clinical mastitis (0.29). Remaining genetic correlations between diseases and production traits were close to zero. The genetic correlation between clinical mastitis and somatic cell score was 0.69. This study revealed reliable genetic parameters for health disorders and underlined the possibility of precise health data recording by farmers from contract herds that can be used for genetic evaluation of health traits.