Pain is an important cause for compromised welfare in swine herds. However,painful processing procedures have  become part of routine farm management, and this incongruity has been the focus of many nonhuman animal welfare
arguments. Processing procedures are 1-time events compared with the ever present susceptibility to painful diseases. Despite the widespread impacts, pain associated with diseases (lameness, Mastitis-Metritus-Agalactia Syndrome, pleuritis, and the like) is seldom addressed in animal welfare discussion; the focus, when discussed, often is on the painful processing procedures. Pain persists for longer than the clinical signs, may remain invisible, and may lead to hyperalgesia. The problem with diseases as a threat to welfare is that despite a herd-level prevalence, often diseases are dealt with on an individual basis. In reality, it may have higher impacts on herd-level welfare than usually ascribed, and providing evidence to this situation is an epidemiological challenge. Translating individual level assessments for herd-level relevance needs consideration of severity, duration, and prevalence. Often, only the severity of the disease at the individual level alone is assessed—which is clearly insufficient. A low-intensity pain but for a long duration may be of different significance to an individual animal within a herd