Welfare-Adjusted Life Years (WALY): A novel metric of animal welfare that combines the impacts of impaired welfare and abbreviated lifespan.

ABSTRACT: Currently, separate measures are used to estimate the impact of animal diseases on mortality and animal welfare. This article introduces a novel metric, the Welfare-Adjusted Life Year (WALY), to estimate disease impact by combining welfare compromise and premature death components. Adapting the Disability-Adjusted Life Year approach used in human health audits, we propose WALY as the sum of a) the years lived with impaired welfare due to a particular cause and b) the years of life lost due to the premature death from the same cause. The years lived with impaired welfare are the product of the average duration of each welfare impediment, reflecting the actual condition that compromises animal welfare, the probability of an incident case developing and impaired welfare weights, representing

SUBMITTER: Teng KT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6135394 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature