Freezing procedures for greater flexibility in application of the digestive method for post-mortem recovery of cattle Nematodes.

It is generally accepted that not all the nematodes present in the alimentary tract of cattle are recovered through conventional methods of post-mortem examination, even when the inner wall is thoroughly scrubbed and rinsed. Some of the nematodes, especially the immature worms, are either embedded in or firmly attached to the mucosa. In an attempt to obtain a more accurate estimation of the nematode population of the alimentary tract of experimental cattle at the Georgia Experiment Station, it was decided to utilize the digestion technique advocated by Herlich (1956) for the recovery of embedded and adherent worms. The addition of the number of worms obtained by this method to the number obtained by preliminary rinsing would offer a practically complete determination of the worm load. Material so treated must be examined shortly after completion of the digestive process in order to prevent any detrimental effect on the worms by the medium. Since the number of cattle necropsied at one time is usually too large to permit such prompt examination, an experiment was designed to determine the practibility of (1) freezing the material obtained by digestion of the fresh organs and maintaining it in that state for later examination, and (2) freezing the fresh digestive tract and keeping it in that state for some time prior to its digestion and subsequent freezing. MATERIAL AND METHODS