Epidemiological, clinical and control investigations on field porcine coccidiosis: clinical, epidemiological and parasitological paradigms?

Abstract

For several reasons, we are convinced that the parasitologist community must look again at porcine neonatal coccidiosis. We find it surprising that this disease is seldom addressed, and that assumptions are not always supported by clinico-epidemiological analysis. For example, the relationship between diarrhoea and the excretion of oocysts during experimental infection versus field infection is not questioned. Lindsay et al. review parasitological knowledge of this disease in the latest (1999) edition of Diseases of swine. Although this paper is divided into two parts, we have three distinct objectives: (1) to bring to the debate our experience in the medical control of this disease; (2) to propose a diagnostic methodology; (3) to raise some questions on various clinical, epidemiological and parasitological unknowns.