Bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) causes significant welfare harm through neonatal disease, reproductive failure, and immunosuppression, but is preventable through vaccination and biosecurity.
BVD causes welfare harm at multiple levels. PI calves often develop mucosal disease, a severely painful and invariably fatal condition. Transiently infected cattle experience fever, respiratory disease, and diarrhoea. Herds with high BVD prevalence show elevated rates of respiratory disease and increased overall disease burden due to immunosuppression. Prevention through testing to identify and remove PI animals, combined with vaccination of naïve cattle, is highly effective. National eradication programmes, as demonstrated in Scotland and Scandinavia, show that herd-level welfare improvement is achievable at scale.