The artificial transmission of Besnoitia besnoiti (Marotel, 1912) from chronically infected to susceptible cattle and rabbits.

Besnoitia besnoiti was first described by Besnoit & Robin (1912), who observed the thick-walled parasitic cysts in the skin of a chronically infected cow in Southern France. The crescentic organisms within the cysts, which they called spores, will be referred to as cyst forms or cyst organisms in this discussion , in contradistinction to proliferative forms which are encountered in macrophages or lying free during the acute stage of the disease.