3. Results
During treatment and follow up, pigs from the treated groups involved in this experiment were apparently normal without apparent adverse events. All pigs used in this study were posi- tive to cysticercosis at tongue examination as well as positive to 4 or more antibody bands enzyme-linked immunoelectro transfer blot. After necropsy, the overall parasite load including viable or degenerated cysts for each group was 1 658 (131–2 575) (me- dian, interquartile range) cysts for control group, 1414 (511– 4 052) cysts for TCBZ treated group, and 259 (38–1 953) cysts for OFZ treated group (Table 1). All remaining cysts in the OFZ pigs were evidently degenerated. Furthermore, the numbers of cysts were statistically significantly smaller in OFZ group compared with the TCBZ and control groups (P < 0.01).
TCBZ had very little effect against the parasitic cysts. Cysts from animals in the TCBZ group looked apparently normal after treatment. However, histological evaluation showed a mild to moderate degree of inflammation composed of eosinophils, macrophages, lymphocytes, plasmocytes, and fibroblasts with connective tissue in the surrounding parenchyma (Figure 1) in all samples from this group. On the other hand, OFZ killed 100% of cysts in treated pigs, and all animals in this group showed only degenerated cysts. The inflammatory reaction around cysts from the OFZ group was severe, and also demonstrated areas of dystrophic calcification (Figure 2). No inflammatory reaction was observed in pericystic tissue samples from pigs in the control group.