Despite the important role of goats for meat and milk production
in Ethiopia, little information is available on the epidemiology
of caprine tuberculosis (TB). Caprine TB is important as milk is
usually consumed raw particularly by Ethiopian pastoralists. The
objectives of the present study were to estimate the prevalence
of TB in goats at an abattoir, to evaluate associated risk
factors and to characterize the causative mycobacteria. A cross-
sectional study was conducted on 1990 randomly selected male
goats that were slaughtered at Luna Export Abattoir of central
Ethiopia. Postmortem examination, mycobacterial culturing and
molecular typing techniques like genus typing, deletion typing
and spoligotyping were used. The overall prevalence of caprine
TB-like lesions was 3.5%. The lesion prevalence increased
significantly with increasing age. Mycobacteria were found by
culture and seen as acid fast bacilli in 12% of the goats with
TB-like lesions. Characterization of the eight isolates using
multiplex polymerase