As millions headed to slaughterhouses across the Kingdom Monday to offer their animal sacrifices, veterinarians said that taenia saginata, a parasitic worm that uses animals as an intermediate host, topped the list of diseases in sacrificial animals. “Most of the sacrificial animals slaughtered in Riyadh slaughterhouses were found infected with the parasitic worm, said Abdulrahman Al-Qarawi,” supervisor of Aziziya Slaughterhouse in Riyadh Monday. The livers of the animals found with the parasitic worm were discarded after slaughtering. Essmat, a veterinarian at a Riyadh slaughterhouse, urged people to shop around for a healthy animal before coming to the slaughterhouse. The veterinarian advised people to beware of animals with symptoms like weight loss, diarrhea, loss of appetite, thin and tender wool, fatigue, and isolation from other animals, arching of the back, swollen abdomen, and dizziness. This type of tapeworm which can affect both humans and animals is found where animals are raised by infected humans maintaining poor hygiene through the ingestion of human feces containing the eggs of the parasite, he said. Humans become infected by the parasitic worm through the ingestion of raw or poorly cooked meat of infected animals, he added. The worm is normally three to five meters in length, but it can become very large, over 20 meters in some situations, he added.
