Schistosoma bovis is a two-host blood fluke, that causes intestinal schistosomiasis in ruminants in North Africa, Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East.

Sonsino gave the name Bilharzia bovis[4] following the genus classification introduced by another German physician Heinrich Meckel von Hemsbach in 1856 for the species described by Bilharz.

Though the genus name remained confusing, Louis-Joseph Alcide Railliet (in 1893) and Raphaël Blanchard (in 1895) revived and maintained the species name, bovis.

[4] The valid genus name Schistosoma was accepted by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) in 1954,[11] following the name created by David Friedrich Weinland in 1858.

[13] Schistosoma bovis infects two hosts, namely ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep, horses and camels) and freshwater snails (Bulinus sp.

[15]: 392  Experimental infections have been proven in Planorbarius metidjensis snails, which are native to Northwestern Africa and the Iberian peninsula.

[citation needed] In water, its free swimming infective larval cercariae can burrow into the skin of its definite host, the ruminant, upon contact.

[16][17][18] Miracidia penetrate into the intermediate host, the freshwater snails[19] of the Bulinus spp., (e.g. B. globosus, B. forskalii, B. nyassanus and B. truncatus), except in Spain,[15]: 20  Portugal and Morocco, where Planorbarius metidjensis can transmit.

One month – or more with cooler ambient temperatures – after a miracidium has penetrated into the snail, hundreds to thousands of cercariae of the same sex begin to be released through special areas of the sporocyst wall.

[21][15]: 34 S. bovis infects snails in Africa north of the equator, Europe (Sardinia, Corsica, Spain) and the Middle East as far as Iraq.

[15]: 402 Various polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays to differentiate S. bovis from other schistosomes in urine and naturally infected snails for surveillance purposes have been described since 2010.