Losses occur due through condemnation of infected carcasses and the reduction in carcass value due to the poor quality of the meat. The overall high prevalence of this parasite in cattle can also reduce the range of possible export markets open to particular countries. The cost of human treatment has also to be considered as the parasite is zoonotic. T. saginata is also closely related to the more dangerous Taenia solium, which causes additional and more serious zoonotic problems than T. saginata since the cysts can also infect humans with fatal results.

It is not possible to identify T. saginata infected cattle ante-mortem by conventional helminthological methods, which constitutes a problem for the implementation of epidemiological studies. Currently, meat inspection is used to remove aesthetically unacceptable, heavily infected carcasses from the market. Unfortunately epidemiologically important more lightly infected carcasses very often escape detection because of the inherently inaccuracy and insensitivity of the meat inspection procedure. A characteristic of this parasite is its huge biotic potential so that lightly infected carcasses escaping into the food chain are quite sufficient, to ensure not only the continuation of the life cycle, but also the maintenance of high prevalence of the parasite. Therefore current meat inspection procedures do not markedly aid control.

Another major disadvantage of meat inspection is that diagnosis of infection occurs post-mortem, when it is too late to make decisions about possible treatment or management changes on the farm of origin and worse, when a considerable amount of time and effort has been expended in rearing the cattle to slaughter weight.

What is needed are tools such as suitably designed immunoassays to allow an accurate assessment of the extent of this problem to be made through carrying out epidemiological surveys and effective vaccines to act as aids to the design of appropriate control methods. High prevalence of either T. saginata or T. solium in the human and livestock populations of any country are indicators of poor standards of public health sanitation and meat inspection. Possibly due to the unpleasant nature of these tapeworms, one approach is apparently to pretend they do not exist and simply sweep the problem 'under the carpet'.

The purpose of this project was to develop methods to establish the extent of this problem and to devise practical control measures.