In addition to the means of transport used and the transport duration, the qualification of transportation personnel, technical equipment, ventilation parameters and the incidence of critical events were recorded.
The main effects of loading density, trailer microclimate, transport duration, animal size and condition, management factors including bedding, ventilation, handling, facilities, and vehicle design are summarized by species.
While this is likely to have biased the aromatic hydrocarbon level towards the null, there was no evidence that the PGEs were also influenced by the transport duration.
To analyze the impact of transport duration on the cooling efficacy, we divided the transport duration into four quartiles.
Transport duration ranged from 6 to 22 h (median: 15.25 h).
Model averaging showed that variation in FGM concentrations was best explained by days post-arrival and transport duration.
Thus, we considered these covariates (creatinine level, gestational age at inclusion, transport duration, and duration of storage between collection and analysis) to be potential confounders.
The covariates that best explained the variation in FGM concentration in order of importance were the number of days post-arrival, transport duration and pyrexia.
Based on model averaging, the covariates that best explained variation in FGM concentrations were days post arrival, transport duration, and pyrexia, which all had large standardized effect sizes and differed from zero (Fig. 1).
Days post arrival was selected in all of the best candidate models, but transport duration was almost as important (Fig. 1) and was only left out of two of the best models (Table 4).
