Cattle Farmers in Nigeria Know Their Worms—but Not the Threat of Drug Resistance

On cattle farms scattered across the forest-savannah mosaic of Kwara State in north-central Nigeria, a quiet disconnect is emerging between what farmers know about parasitic worms and what they understand about the drugs used to defeat them. A new cross-sectional survey, published in BMC Agriculture, has found that while most cattle farmers in the state possess a reasonable grasp of helminth infections—the parasitic worm diseases that sap growth, fertility and milk yield from their herds—the overwhelming majority remain unaware of anthelmintic resistance, the creeping evolutionary threat that could render the few available deworming drugs useless. The study, led by Shola David Ola-Fadunsin of the University of Ilorin, is being described by its authors as the first comprehensive assessment of knowledge, attitudes and practices relating to both helminthosis and drug resistance among cattle farmers in the state.

The research team interviewed 133 cattle farmers and farm workers across Kwara State between March 2024 and May 2025, using a validated semi-structured questionnaire delivered through an open data kit mobile tool. Respondents were drawn from the three senatorial districts of the state, which covers roughly 35,705 square kilometres between latitudes 8.05°N and 10.15°N. To determine how many participants to recruit, the team applied a standard veterinary epidemiological formula based on an expected prevalence of Dicrocoelium dendriticum infection among local cattle, calculating a minimum sample of 38 farmers and ultimately enrolling well over three times that number. Eligible participants were farm owners or workers over eighteen years of age who were directly involved in the daily feeding, watering, rearing or care of cattle and who gave verbal consent.

The questionnaire itself was built through a rigorous multi-stage process: identifying the topic, selecting the target population, formulating knowledge, attitude and practice questions with scored answer options, and validating the instrument by calculating Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, which came out at 0.78 for knowledge, 0.76 for attitudes and 0.92 for practices—figures indicating good internal consistency. Each respondent answered twenty questions: seven on knowledge of helminths, seven on attitudes towards the infections, and six on practices. Scoring was weighted so that fully correct answers, strongly positive attitudes and completely good practices earned two points, with partial responses earning one and poor responses zero. Respondents scoring above the calculated mean thresholds—5.59 for knowledge, 7.67 for attitudes and 7.61 for practices—were classified as satisfactory.

The headline finding was a striking asymmetry. Overall, the survey recorded a satisfactory level of knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding helminth infections themselves. About 69 percent of farmers knew about helminth infections and more than 81 percent could recognise the clinical signs, which range from anemia, diarrhea and emaciation to reduced milk yield, infertility and poor carcass quality. The most important culprits are gastrointestinal nematodes, lungworms and liver fluke, parasites whose damage translates directly into lost income and, at the national scale, lost contributions to Nigeria’s GDP. Yet when the questions turned to anthelmintic resistance, the picture darkened dramatically: 67.67 percent of farmers had no knowledge of the phenomenon at all, and 81.95 percent were ignorant of how it could be managed.

The knowledge gaps extended into other critical territory. Nearly half of respondents—48.87 percent—could not name or identify the types of helminths affecting their cattle, and only 8.27 percent knew how the parasites are transmitted. Even more striking, 93.23 percent of farmers were unaware that vaccines could play any role in helminth control, and on the practice side, every single farmer recorded a poor score regarding vaccine use, reflecting in part the scarcity of commercially available vaccines for most veterinary helminths. Attitudinal results were similarly mixed: while majorities held positive views about consulting veterinarians, the necessity of treating infections and the preventability of helminthosis, 77.44 percent failed to recognise the economic importance of the disease, and 57.14 percent held negative attitudes towards the role of hygiene in control.

Not all the practical news was discouraging. Solid majorities of farmers demonstrated good practices in the fundamentals of anthelmintic deployment: 79.70 percent scored well on the age at which they begin deworming, 71.43 percent on the frequency of administration, 77.44 percent on the route of administration and the same proportion on herd-level treatment, and 71.43 percent showed good practice in their choice of drugs. These fundamentals matter because the way anthelmintics are used—treatment frequency, dosing accuracy and the tendency towards mass medication and under-dosing—are among the key drivers of resistance development. Recommended countermeasures include combining drugs from different anthelmintic classes and adopting ‘refugia’ strategies, which deliberately leave a proportion of the parasite population unexposed to treatment so that susceptible genes dilute the resistant ones in the parasite population.

Statistical analysis using binary logistic regression revealed that five factors significantly shaped farmers’ knowledge, attitudes and practices: age, educational status, role on the farm, herd size and farming experience. Older farmers, more educated farmers, farm owners, those with larger herds and those with longer farming experience all recorded higher satisfactory levels. The pattern is interpretable through economic and cognitive lenses: larger herds represent bigger capital investments that incentivise knowledge-seeking, farm owners bear the financial consequences of disease directly, and accumulated years of livestock experience build practical disease literacy. The findings echo earlier studies from Iran, Rwanda, Ethiopia and elsewhere, which similarly linked education, ownership and herd size to better parasite and drug-resistance awareness.

Perhaps most significant for intervention design was the demonstration that the three dimensions of the survey move together. Spearman’s rank correlation analysis showed a positive, moderate association between knowledge and attitudes (rs = 0.538), a moderate positive link between knowledge and practices (rs = 0.639) and a strong positive correlation between attitudes and practices (rs = 0.830), all statistically significant at P = 0.01. In plain terms, farmers who understand helminths tend to view them more seriously and manage them better—which suggests that education campaigns targeting knowledge gaps, particularly around anthelmintic resistance, could cascade into improved behaviour across the whole chain from belief to action.

The authors caution that their results should be generalised cautiously across Nigeria’s ethnically and educationally diverse farming population, and they acknowledge the limitations inherent in self-reported questionnaires, including potential social desirability bias, and the inability of a cross-sectional design to establish causation. Nevertheless, the message is clear and urgent. Anthelmintic drugs remain the foundation of helminth control worldwide and are likely to remain so given the dearth of vaccines, yet intensive use has already produced dramatic resistance in cattle, goats, sheep and horses across the globe, escalating production costs and threatening livestock sustainability. The team’s recommendation is straightforward: cattle farmers in Kwara State—and by extension comparable settings across sub-Saharan Africa—need targeted enlightenment about anthelmintic resistance, its management and the true economic weight of helminth infections, before the region’s limited arsenal of effective dewormers is quietly lost.Subject of Research: Knowledge, attitudes and practices of cattle farmers regarding helminth infections and anthelmintic resistance in Kwara State, Nigeria.

Subject of Research: Cattle farmers' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding helminth infections and anthelmintic resistance in Kwara State, Nigeria

Article Title: Appraisal of knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding helminth infections and anthelmintic resistance among cattle farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria

Article References: Appraisal of knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding helminth infections and anthelmintic resistance among cattle farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-026-00034-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-026-00034-0

Keywords: anthelmintic resistance, cattle, helminth infections, Kwara State, Nigeria, knowledge attitudes practices, livestock farmers, gastrointestinal nematodes, refugia, veterinary parasitology, helminthosis, cross-sectional survey