الفهرس 
INTRODUCTION
Historical BackgroundOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Protozoa especially those of intracellular peculiarity like Toxoplasma gondii still today threaten the health of human and animals although considerable progress had been achieved latterly. However, the ongoing bad habits, direct dealing with feline, probability of eating undercooked meat, andclinical miss-detection of these parasitesoffers better chance for their maintenance and flourishing.
This study was done to detect the prevalence rate of T.gondii among slaughtered animals (sheep, cattle, and camels) in Aswan Governorate, Southern Egypt at two major slaughterhouses (Aswan and Draw) using latex agglutination test (LAT) as a rapid common screening test, and comparing its results with the results of microscopic and conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques.
In this study, 106 serum samples and 106 tissue specimens of(heart, liver, and diaphragm) were collected from three slaughtered animal species (27 sheep, 42 cattle, and 37 camels). The sera were examined for T.gondii antibodies by LAT. The obtained data revealed that the prevalence ofT.gondii was 48.1%. There was a highly statistically significant difference between the three studied species(p ≤ 0.01).Out of the 27 examined sheep 11 (40.7%) were seropositive to T.gondii while out of 42 cattle, 28 were infected with overall prevalence (66.7%) and the seroprevalence among 37 camel samples was 12 with percent (32.4%).
As regard gender, it was found that the prevalence rate was higher in males (53.7%) than females (38.5%). To species, the positive percentage was higher in the male sheep, cattle, and camels (42.9% and 69.4%, and 33.3%, respectively) than females (40%, 50%, and 30.8%,
respectively).There was no significance difference between both sex inside each species.
According to age, the overall prevalence of T.gondii was higher in adult animals (58.2%) 32/55 than in young animals (37.3%) 19/51. It was higher in adultsheep and camels (50%; 7/14 and 50%; 5/10, respectively) than youngs (30.8%; 4/13 and 25.9%; 7/27, respectively). The infection rate was lower in adult cattle 64.5% (20/31) than in youngs 72.7% (8/11).There wasno significance difference in the three species between the two age groups as well as within the same species.
Microscopic and molecular (PCR) examination for tissue specimens ofthe sero-reactive animals revealed that out of the 51 seropositive samples, 24 (47.1%) were positive microscopically, while the molecular examination recorded higher rate 56.9% (29/51). Sheep tissue samples showed that 9/11 (81.8%) by both techniques. Cattle had 10/28 (35.7%) positive cases by microscopy while 14/28 (50%) by PCR. Camels showed 41.7% (5/12) positivity by microscopy and 50% (6/12) by PCR.There was no significance difference between results of both detection methods.