Fig. 1

Forest plot of 82 studies included in a mixed-effects meta-analysis for prevalence of sub-clinical mastitis among cattle in Africa from January 2010 through to December 2020 [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83]. The diamond at the bottom represents the summarized prevalence. The grey boxes and horizontal lines through the boxes represent the weighed prevalence and the 95% confidence interval, respectively, for each included study. A shorter horizontal line suggests better precision of the study result. ‘Cases’ is the number of cattle that tested positive using the California mastitis test, ‘Total’ is the number tested, while ‘Proportion’ is the prevalence divided by 100. The weights that each study contributes to the summarised effect size (both fixed and random effects models) are shown as percentages in the last two columns. CI = confidence interval, as an index of precision for estimation of prevalence. Meta-analysis was conducted using ‘meta’ and ‘metafor’ packages in R version 4.2.1 [84]