The influence of epidemiological factors to prevalence of Cryptosporidium parvum of neonatal calves in northern Kazakhstan

Abstract

Logistic regression analysis was conducted to assess the epidemiological factors influencing the Cryptosporidium parvum infection in bovine farms in Northern Kazakhstan. Faecal samples were collected on 24 farms from 245 neonatal calves and analysed using microscopy and immune chromatographic commercial kits. The prevalence of calves’ infection ranged from 1.6% to 29.1%. In bivariate regression analysis four epidemiological factors, including “age of calves”, “clinical appearance of diarrhoea”, “calves housed without dam” and “large type of farm” were found to be significantly associated with infection; the associations were confirmed by the multivariate analysis. Moreover, the last analysis suggests also that the above first three epidemiological factors favoured C. parvum infection of calves.