Abstract

Schistosomiasis is a snail-borne trematode infection in man, domestic animals and wild animals in tropical and sub-tropical countries and it is one of the neglected tropical infectious diseases yet having considerable impacts from the public health and economical dimensions. A cross sectional study was conducted from October, 2017 to April, 2018 in the North Gulf of Lake Tana, Northwest Ethiopia to estimate the prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis and to explore the different associated risk factors that influence its occurrence. Simple random sampling technique was employed to select 304 study cattle from three selected districts. Of the 304 cattle considered, 20.1% (61/304) were found to be positive for Schistosoma bovis on coprological examination. The prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis was highest in Takusa district (29.1%) followed by West Dembia (17.6%) and East Dembia districts (13.1%) respectively. The difference in prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis among three districts was statistically significant (x²=8.612, P =0.013). With a statistically significant difference (x²=10.920, P=0.004) in prevalence among the differently body conditioned animals, the highest prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis was recorded in the poor body conditioned animals (29.3%) followed by animals having medium (14.0%) and good (13.3%) body condition scores respectively. Age of animals was found to be an important risk factor for the occurrence of Bovine Schistosomiasis and the highest prevalence was recorded in age group of cattle between 2-5 years (30.2%) than in animals above 5 years of age (15.7%) and that of age group below 2 years (6.7%) and the variation in prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis among the age groups was statistically highly significant (x²=16.426, P=0.000). With no statistical significant difference in prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis, higher prevalence was indicated in local (21.2%), females (20.7%), and extensively managed animals (21.2%) than the prevalence in the cross breeds (7.7%), males (19.3%) and semi-intensively managed animals (15.6%) respectively. This much prevalence of Bovine Schistosomiasis in the study area necessitates that prevention and control measures targeting the parasite, snail intermediate host and husbandry systems be designed to reduce the productivity, economic and public health impacts that the disease, Bovine Schistosomiasis, may pose.

Keywords: Bovine schistosomiasis; Cattle; Lake tana; Schistosoma bovis