In June 2014, Albania was granted EU candidate status, thus starting a process of compliance with the membership criteria. In this context, a modern meat inspection approach in line with the European legislation was applied to a pig slaughterhouse in northern Albania in order to investigate the ante-mortem (AM) and post-mortem (PM) conditions and the relationship between these findings. For this purpose, 3930 pigs divided into 35 batches were evaluated over a 3-month period. The most frequent AM conditions recorded were tail lesions and dyspnea (9.1%), followed by skin (8.9%) and ear lesions (8.5%), while in the PM inspections, pleuritis was the most frequently observed condition (10.2%), followed by pneumonia (8.5%), liver alterations (5.7%), milk spot liver (3.8%), and pericarditis (3.3%). With the exception of liver alterations, the other PM lesions mentioned were positively associated with lesions on the ears (OR = 1.036; p < 0.001) and skin (OR = 1.026; p = 0.011) and dyspnea (OR = 1.021; p = 0.005), confirming the link between these variables and the health and welfare conditions of pigs on farms. Overall, the evidence that emerged from this Albanian slaughterhouse can be considered in line with other European contexts, especially in light of the considerable variability in the data present in the literature.
A study on impact of the age and the type of breeding on the infection level of cattle hyperdemosis was conducted in the cattle of Kruja district through the use of clinical control of the livestock. Out of 386 cattle controlled 42 individuals proved to be positive, or 10.88 % out of the total. The highest percentage of infection was present in the age groups between 2 and 5 years old at 14.2 % of cattle, while the lowest percentage of infection was detected in cattle with the age group at 8 years old or with 2.63 % of cattle. This was statistically tested where R 2 = 0.9228. The highest percentage of infection was in cattle that are being bred in a pasture regime at 5.79 %, while the infection percentage in the livestock bred in the pen-pasture regime was at 14.19 %. the lowest percentage was in cattle that are being bred in the pen regime at 5.91 %. The larvae accumulated from the infected cattle were identified as larvae of bovis hypodermosis.
Enzootic bovine leukosis (EBL) is a notifiable infectious disease with sporadic fre-quency in Albania. EBL is not a zoonotic disease, but it has an important impact on the cattle trade. Diagnosis of this disease can be performed by many diagnostic proce-dures, including agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. In some cases, where persis-tent lymphocytosis is present, cell count can turn useful. This study aimed to evaluate serological and hematological tests' suitability for the diagnosis of EBL and assess the manual and automatic hematological count technique diagnostic parameters com-pared to the serological test. Results suggest that strategic use of hematological and AGID tests in parallel can increase the sensitivity of diagnosis and facilitate the detec-tion of infected animals in different disease stages. Moreover, our results indicate that this approach is feasible in small scale cattle herds size, which properly fits Albanian circumstances
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