Impact of heat and cold waves on female cattle mortality beyond the effect of extreme temperatures

Abstract Although heat and cold temperatures are known to have an impact on cattle mortality, no study has evidenced and quantified the influence of the prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures beyond the single effect of daily temperatures. We defined a heat (or cold) wave by a continuous variable indicating the number of successive days with temperatures above (or below) a given threshold. For heat wave, the threshold was set to the 95th or 99th percentile of the mean daily temperature distribution and for cold wave to the 1st or 5th percentile. We collected female cattle mortality data by type of production and age classes between 2001 and 2015 for 100 iso‐hygro‐thermal areas in France. We used time-series analyses to estimate the area-specific heat wave- and cold wave-mortality relationships. Then, we applied meta-analyses to pool area-specific effects at the country level for each definition of heat and cold wave. For each type of production and age classes, our models predicted symmetrical relationships between temperature and mortality, with a temperature range of minimum mortality located approximately between 15 and 20 °C THI in most categories. Outside that range, relative risks between 1.3 and 2.5 were estimated for extreme cold temperatures and relative risks between 1.1 and 1.5 were estimated for extreme hot temperatures depending on age categories and production type. Our results indicated that a prolonged exposure to high (or low) temperatures caused a significant increase on mortality (up to 40% during heat waves and 23% for cold waves, depending on type of production and age classes), in addition to the effect of extreme temperature alone. This additional mortality risk increased along with the duration and intensity of the exposure. Our results suggest that not discriminating the effect of the prolonged exposure to extreme temperature, may overestimate the effect of temperature alone on mortality.