Study on Nutrition-Parasite Interaction in Goats with Nematodosis

A study was conducted on twenty indigenous goat kids allocated into five different groups. All animals were offered ad libitum rice straw and berseem hay (40:60). Group I was fed concentrate mixture (100g/d). Group II, III, IV and V were supplemented with UMMB, Med-UMMB (containing fenbendazole@0.5g/kg), tannin (5% of DM) and UMMB plus tannin (5% of DM), respectively. The animals were given trickle infection (200L3/d) of gastrointestinal nematodes (Haemonchus sp. and Cooperia sp. in the dose ratio of 9:1) for 10 consecutive days. The experiment lasted for 90 days. There was no significant difference in dry matter intake, gain in body weight and feed conversion efficiency. EPG differed significantly (P<0.05) in different treatments during 45th day, 60th day, 75th day and 90th day. There was significant increase in the myofibrillar protein and sarcoplasmic protein in T4 and T5 group respectively. The humoral immune response against CRBC was highest in T4 group. There were no significant pathological changes observed in the histological slides of liver, kidney and duodenum of the goat kids sacrificed on 90th day of the experiment.