VOLUME 10 NO. 1 JANUARY 2019 • pages 103-106 MALAYSIAN JOURNAL OF VETERINARY RESEARCH SHORT COMMUNICATION PROTOZOAN INFECTION IN SCAVENGING CHICKENS FROM PENANG ISLAND AND BOTA, PERAK, MALAYSIA FARAH HAZIQAH M.T.* AND NIK AHMAD IRWAN IZZAUDDIN N.H. School of Biological Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 USM, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia * Corresponding author:
[email protected] ABSTRACT. Chickens are the most abundant INTRODUCTION birds in the world, providing protein in the form of meat and eggs. Meat from Protozoans are unicellular organisms in scavenging chickens or ‘ayam kampung’ which the body consists of the cytoplasm has a strong flavour and is juicier than that with at least one nucleus. Protozoan of commercial chickens. Most of the rural parasites are responsible for causing villagers still keep the chickens in small severe infections both in humans and flocks, allowing to range freely around animals worldwide. The infection is mainly the house or the backyard, require little transmitted through a faecal-oral route (for attention and feed mainly on kitchen wastes. example, contaminated food or water) or by Due to their free-range and scavenging arthropod vectors through blood transfusion habits, protozoan infections are commonly by vectors which are ticks or mosquitoes, high because they have an increased namely Mansonia spp., Aedes spp., Culex opportunity to encounter the oocysts and spp. and Armigeres spp. (Permin and Hansen, intermediate hosts such as mosquitoes 1998; Salih et al., 2015). Protozoan are divided and flies. Out of 240 scavenging chickens into five major groups; flagellata, amebida, examined, two protozoan parasites have ciliophora, sporozoa and cnidosporidia. been recovered, namely Eimeria sp.