Table 5.

Relationship between faecal consistency and enteropathogens in Dutch dairy calves per week of age. The probability of detecting ‘custard-like’ faeces or diarrhoea given one of the five enteropathogens is expressed as odds ratios from a multinominal regression model, whereas the probability of finding one of the five enteropathogens given ‘custard-like’ faeces or diarrhoea is calculated using Bayes’ rule. These probabilities were only calculated for pathogens that had a significant OR in the multinomial regression. In total 424 calves in 108 herds were sampled between January and April 2007.

Week of age	Enteropathogen	‘Custard-like’ faeces			Diarrhoea
		Multinomial model		Bayes’ rule	Multinomial model		Bayes’ rule
		OR (CI)	P-value	Probability	OR (CI)	P-value	Probability
1	E. coli	2.5 (0.3–21)	0.41		8.6 (1.2–64)	0.04	0.10
	Corona	6.3 (0.5–77)	0.15		3.0 (0.2–59)	0.47
	C. parvum	1.3 (0.4–5.0)	0.68		11.3 (3.8–33)	<0.01	0.43
	Rota	5.8 (1.9–18)	<0.01	0.31	6.8 (1.9–24)	<0.01	0.20
	Cl. perfringens	1.0 (0.4–2.3)	1.00		0.9 (0.3–2.4)	0.78
2	Corona	3.3 (0.3–41)	0.34		4.3 (0.4–46)	0.23
	C. parvum	2.4 (1.1–2.4)	0.03	0.66	8.2 (3.2–21)	<0.01	0.43
	Rota	1.2 (0.5–3.2)	0.65		1.4 (0.5–3.9)	0.48
	Cl. perfringens	1.1 (0.5–2.4)	0.16		3.7 (1.5–9.4)	<0.01	0.29
3	C. parvum	3.0 (0.8–11)	0.10		3.7 (0.7–20)	0.12
	Rota	0.5 (0.1–2.6)	0.39		1.3 (0.2–8.6)	0.76
	Cl. perfringens	1.1 (0.4–2.8)	0.86		1.5 (0.4–6.1)	0.53

The R-squared of the multinominal models were 0.15, 0.13 and 0.03 for the first, second and third week of age, respectively.