Thank you very much, Bruce. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you all to this evening's webinar.

Before we begin, I just wanted to remind everyone that I've provided the webinar vet with a comprehensive set of notes, so there should be no need to scribble down lots of notes as we go through this evening's presentation. I've also provided the webinar vet with a number of multiple choice questions at the end if anyone wants to do them, and then obviously there's answers to go with them. As we go through this evening's webinar, I think it's important to remember that there's only 2 notifiable diseases in poultry, avian influenza and Newcastle disease and avian influenza has got zoonotic potential, so we'll talk a little bit more about that whenever we come onto it.

I think one of the most frightening things as a new graduate is being the vet that misses a notifiable disease. Now it's one thing to miss something like foot and mouth in a cow whereby you're used to seeing cattle on a regular basis if you're a general or large animal vet. But if you're a small animal vet or a general practitioner and you don't see a lot of poultry, differentiating something like infectious bronchitis from avian influenza can be really, really challenging to do.

So hopefully by the end of this evening's webinar, you'll have a better idea of what to look for. Now before I try and guide you through differentiating between notifiables and non-notifiables in poultry, I just wanted to talk about some of the challenges that you might face in general practise or small animal practise. I'm very lucky when I deal with commercial flocks because generally there's very defined protocols for commercial poultry keepers.

If the daily mortality were to exceed 0.3% in a day, then the farmer must give the vet a call. And as a vet, when I go out on the farm, if the mortality in a day is above 1%, even I start to get a bit worried unless there's an obvious cause for the deaths in the flock.

But in backyard flocks, if you've got someone with 10 or 20 hens, then the death of one bird can represent between 5 and 10% of the flock. So if that was a commercial flock, you really would be panicking. But in backyard situations, it's much more difficult.

I've put in my slide that biosecurity is variable in backyard flocks. I think it's probably fair to say that biosecurity is non-existent for a number of backyard holdings. And again, that makes the risk for notifiable disease much greater.

One of the biggies, and something I'll talk about a little bit more later on in the webinar, is that most backyard flocks are not vaccinated against common respiratory pathogens. So whenever I see a commercial flock of poultry and they've got respiratory signs, immediately the common non-notifiable diseases become much less likely. And even if commercial birds do get infected with, say, for example, infectious bronchitis, the clinical signs will be relatively mild.

But for non-vaccinated backyard chickens, you tend to find that even common diseases like infectious bronchitis or avian monotracheitis will cause severe clinical signs and can almost mimic or notifiables. Additionally, many backyard holdings are multi-age, something which the commercial side of things tends to avoid. And the other thing that was a bit unusual about this evening's webinar is normally whenever I present, I include lots of photographs of postmortems of chickens, but in this instance, generally postmortem findings are pretty useless when it comes to trying to differentiate between notifiable and non-autifiable disease.

So one of the key things to remember about notifiable diseases, both Newcastle and avian influenza, is the role that waterfowl and migratory birds play in the epidemiology. This map here shows the flyways for wild birds across the world, and you can see that the UK is snap in the middle of a flyway that stretches all the way from the coast of Canada across Northern Europe and Siberia, all the way down to South Africa. And one of the things that animal health in the UK does is we regularly monitor the strains of avian influenza that are circulating along these flyways.

So there could be a strain currently circulating in South Africa that potentially whenever migratory birds come back from there next autumn, that may be brought back with the birds. So it gives you an idea as to just how easy that avian influenza in particular can be spread globally. And many of these wild birds will carry avian influenza and to a lesser extent Newcastle disease asymptomatically.

Currently, we have got no circulating strains of avian influenza in mainland GB at present, however, It's worth noting that in many parts of the world such as Asia and Africa, avian influenza is endemic in places and is a massive issue. When these migratory birds come in, avian influenza, although it can be transmitted via the respiratory route, it does tend to be transmitted via the faecal oral route. Animal health regularly tests wild birds where they've been found dead and will test a proportion of commercial and backward flocks every year to carry out surveillance, just to make sure that there's not a low pathogenic strain of avian influenza circulating within the UK that we're not yet aware of.

So if you Google avian influenza, this picture of a chicken seems to crop up on most Google searches, and you can see hopefully that it's got a cyanotic face and looks a little bit unwell. So avian influenza is caused by an influenza A virus, and as with influenza in other species, we've got multiple H and N combinations. And depending on these combinations of the H protein and the end protein, we get our different strains of avian influenza.

Now these can be very variable in terms of their host species, in terms of their tissue trophism, and in terms of their pathogenicity. And what happens whenever we identify avian influenza or should I say when animal health identified, is that a sample of it is sent to the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge for typing. In the old days, the avian influenza virus was isolated and then was injected into either dayle chicks or into chick embryos, and there's a formula that they use to determine the pathogenicity, depending on how quickly and how many of the chicks or embryos die.

Now I'm glad to say that currently that method of determining pathogenicity has been replaced by a PCR test, which is considerably faster and obviously doesn't have the animal welfare implications. If we're lucky, the test can be complete in as little as 24 hours, and if we're unlucky, it can take up to 3 days, but it's still a very, very rapid turnaround. So animal health will determine whether or not a given strain of avian influenza can be classed as highly pathogenic avian influenza or lowly pathogenic avian influenza.

And only high pass AI is notifiable. If the strain is determined to be of low virulence and, and it can be legally defined as low pathogenic avian influenza, then it's not notifiable and animal health are not interested. Currently, and to date, we have only seen strains of avian influenza with a H5 or H7 number as being high path.

So all other H numbers H1, H6 have so far been low pathogenic avian influenza. When we get a strain with H5 or H7, this can be low path or high path AI, and unfortunately, the virus can mutate from being low path to high path. So as far as animal health are concerned, they're only really interested in avian influenza strains with a H5 or a H7 number, all of the strains, they're they're not particularly bothered about.

And in terms of sampling, potentially infected birds, they will take swabs of the trachea and they will take theeal swabs for testing, and sometimes they will take blood samples for serology, although generally whenever they've got birds with clinical signs, you're actively looking for the infection rather than for antibodies which may take some time to develop. One of the things that you'll notice as we go through this evening's presentation is that all of the respiratory designs, not necessarily unexpectedly, have got very similar clinical signs. We've got nervous signs in birds.

Sneezing? Diarrhoea, and in some cases the diarrhoea is not true diarrhoea, it's actually polyurea. So because chickens and birds in general do not produce urine in the conventional sense, they urinate and defecate in one motion.

If they've got renal damage and polyurea, it manifests in what we believe or what we would call diarrhoea. In commercial fox, we tend to see less eggs in influenza infections, and the eggshells can be abnormal, as you can see in the photograph on the right, where we've got slightly crinkled eggshells. And mortality can be very variable, and that's the problem with avian influenza.

If you've got a very mild strain, you might just see a few less eggs, something which you might not necessarily notice in a backyard flock. And conversely, if you've got a very virulent strain, you might see very acute death and some nervous signs. It's worth mentioning that currently in Ireland along the Irish border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, there is a strain of avian influenza circulating called H6N1.

So because the H number is not a 5 or a 7, it's pretty much guaranteed to be low pathogenic avian influenza and something that animal health are not particularly interested in. However, because of its commercial implications, the commercial poultry industry in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have decided to voluntarily cull affected flocks. And it's interesting, it's causing minimal mortality and predominantly just some diarrhoea with the odd ill bird being seen, so I think it's quite lucky that actually it was picked up in the first place.

So I'm now going to hand you back to Bruce for our first multiple choice question of the evening. Right guys, quick poll question here. Very, very simply, at what time of year is AI most likely?

Spring, summer, autumn or winter. Just click on the answer that you think is the most appropriate one. And we'll give you about 30 seconds or so to answer that.

Remember please that it is anonymous, so, you know, don't sit on the fence. Let's, let's get clicking and let's get some answers going. .

I think we owe it to Richard to to be listening and to be answering his questions. And it's very simple. As I say, nobody knows.

I can't see who's voting. I can see how many are voting percentage wise, but I can't see who's voting. So there's a couple more that still need to vote.

We'll just give them a, another minute or so, Richard, to hop off the fence and make a choice. Well, not maybe a minute, that's too long. OK.

Oh, that's most of the people that voted. Right, let's end that poll and share those results. Can you see them, Richard?

Yeah, mhm. OK, so it was a slightly trick question, Bruce. It was, and well done to everyone.

I, I think that the key thing with influenza is that it's brought in by migratory birds. So certainly when we've got birds coming in in the autumn time, it can be a huge risk, and I'm really pleased that nobody said this summer because during the summertime we don't have bird migration and as with Influenza in other species in the summertime when the weather's good, we tend not to have so much of an issue, so influenza can affect poultry predominantly in autumn winter, but you can see some cases in the springtime and as we speak, although we're about to go into summertime, and we've still got cases of low path avian influenza in Northern Ireland. Before we move on to our next notifiable disease, Newcastle disease, I just wanted to elaborate a little bit on avian influenza in terms of its zoonotic potential.

Lots of different strains have got different tissue trophisms and different species trophisms, and currently the only strain of avian influenza that's really caused problems for humans in terms of human to human transmission has been H5N1. So when I go on to talk about what happens in a notifiable or bird flu outbreak, and I'll elaborate a little bit more on what they do, but essentially that strain has got the most potential to move between people and obviously with everything that's going on at the minute, although we're thinking about coronavirus in terms of COVID-19, H5N1 avian influenza has got the potential. Under the right conditions to move between people as well.

So although DA get very worried when we find high path AI, if we find the H5N1 avian influenza, they get even more concerned. So our next notifiable disease is Newcastle disease, and it was named after Newcastle here in the UK, and this is where it was first found. And it's a paramyxo1 virus, OK?

And this is very similar to avian influenza in the sense that there is lots of different strains of or types of the paramyxovirus out there, and they all vary in their pathogenicity. The host specificity and the tissue trophism, OK, so again, we've got to send samples off to the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, where they will go and they will work out the virulence of the Newcastle disease strain or the paramyxovirus strain I should correctly say, and work out whether or not it's sufficiently virulent to be classed as Newcastle disease. So, Basically, a paramyxoviruss has to be sufficiently virulent in poultry to be classed as Newcastle disease.

If it's not very pathogenic, it's just classed as a paramyxovirus, but if it reaches sufficient virulence, and again this is detected by PCR nowadays, then it is classed as Newcastle disease. In terms of its tissue trophism, there's generally 3 forms of Newcastle disease. There's the pneumotrophic form, which, as you can imagine, will cause respiratory signs.

There is the viscerotrophic form, which obviously it attacks the the viscera, the digestive tract in particular. And I've got two photographs here in this slide. So the first photograph on the top right of your screen is the gizzard and proventriculus of a bird, and hopefully you'll notice that in the proventriculus there are petechial haemorrhages, and these are pathogonomic for Newcastle disease.

So although I've said that postmortem findings aren't particularly helpful, if you do find proventricular haemorrhages in birds with either nervous signs or birds with respiratory signs. Then I think it's fair to say that Newcastle disease should be very high on your differential list. If you Google Newcastle disease, this photograph on the bottom right will come up of an emerald green diarrhoea, and it's really frustrating.

It was something that was beaten into me at vet school, and I always remember it, but actually there's a heck of a lot of things in poultry that can cause emerald green diarrhoea. It's just the bile because the bird's not eating. So personally, I wouldn't worry if I see emerald green diarrhoea.

I think there's an awful lot of things that can cause it, but certainly petechial haemorrhages of the proventriculus are pathonoma like pretty much for Newcastle disease. There's also the neurotrophic form of Newcastle disease, which, as you can imagine, will cause nervous signs. So in terms of clinical signs, and you can see this ataxic pheasant here in in the photograph, the clinical signs are almost identical to AI and just with AI as you get high path and low path AI, we've got paramyxo virus and it's sufficiently virulent, it is classed as Newcastle disease.

It's worth mentioning the paramyxoviruses are very common in pigeons in particular, and I think that's probably a topic for another webinar on pigeons, but there's certain actions that Dera do and don't take if they find paramyxovirus in a pigeon loft. But the good thing about Newcastle disease is that we've got a range of both live and killed vaccines. From a backyard perspective, irrespective of which disease we're talking about, whether it's a respiratory disease or salmonella, for example, I would always recommend using a killed vaccine.

These live vaccines are designed for commercial flocks, and the vials are designed to be administered to thousands of birds at one time, either through drinking water or through a spray, and they don't work particularly well in a backyard situation. So personally, I prefer to give the birds 2. Kill the vaccines 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster.

And we're very, very lucky because there's a product called RTIB Multi, which is an MSD product, and it has got antigens in it to Newcastle disease. Several strains of infectious bronchitis. Avian rhinotracheitis and a disease which you won't worry about this evening called egg drop syndrome.

So if you vaccinate the birds with this RTIB multi, you're covering your Newcastle disease and you're covering most of the common respiratory pathogens. So from a commercial standpoint, pretty much all of our breeding stock and commercial egg layers are Newcastle vaccinated. So when we see what we think might be notifiable disease in these flocks, we tend to put Newcastle disease almost out of our minds and heavily focus on avian influenza.

And it's worth pointing out actually that there are vaccines against avian influenza across the world. They're not massively effective and currently the European Union doesn't allow their use, and I think that once we leave the EU sort of fully at the end of the year, I don't envisage this is something that's going to change within the UK either. I'm now going to talk about infectious bronchitis, and infectious bronchitis is the most common respiratory pathogen in flocks, both commercially and in terms of backyard flocks.

I suppose it's quite poignant that we're talking about infectious bronchitis this evening because it is indeed a coronavirus, but a completely different coronavirus from COVID-19, so there's absolutely no risk of people and birds cross infecting each other. In terms of an incubation period, the incubation period for infectious bronchitis is between 1 and 3 days, and it is shared via the respiratory and fecal-oral routes. But in common with our notifiable diseases, the clinical signs include sneezing, abnormal eggshells, mortality, and diarrhoea.

And from a commercial standpoint, the clinical signs of infectious bronchitis tend to be pretty mild, but from a backyard perspective, if the flock are non-vaccinated, you can see some pretty awful clinical signs and some quite severe mortality. So it is just something to bear in mind that if the flock's not vaccinated for infectious bronchitis, this is probably much more likely than you notifiable disease. As I mentioned, with Newcastle disease, we can vaccinate them twice with a killed vaccine, this RTIB multi vaccine, 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster, and it's very effective.

So although, like a lot of coronaviruses, infectious bronchitis can mutate quite frequently, there's a number of different strains in this vaccine, and it gives pretty good coverage. But it is important that the birds are boosted annually. It's not enough just to buy in some.

Point of play bullets that have been vaccinated for infectious bronchitis and then to keep them for 5 or 6 years, you really do want to top up their immunity on an annual basis, otherwise it's a bit of a waste of time. The next disease I wanted to talk about is called avian rhinotracheitis, which is a mountain pneumovirus and was originally found only in turkeys, but it appears to have got into chickens a number of years ago. And so it was originally called turkey rhinotracheitis, and it's now called avian rhinotracheitis.

As with infectious bronchitis, it's got an incubation period of 1 to 3 days, and clinical signs include sneezing, abnormal eggshells, mortality, but interestingly, it can cause nervous signs as well. And in terms of protection, again this RTIB multi vaccine will provide adequate coverage. In terms, I should have said, of diagnosing both infectious bronchitis and a neuron a tracheitis, and in the old days we would have done paired serology, but I have to say we're very fortunate now that there's a number of PCR tests available so we can take a swab of the trachea or the Coal cleft in the bird's mouth and send the swab off and we can have PCR testing for a whole panel of respiratory diseases.

They'll cover your infectious bronchitis, your aveotracheitis, and your mycoplasma, which we'll talk about in a little bit as well. I wanted to mention mycoplasma alepticum because I suspect if before we started this evening's webinar, if I asked you which respiratory disease of poultry you'd heard of most commonly, you probably would have said mycoplasma galaticum and rather bizarrely, it's not necessarily on my differentials list when I've got some of the the potential for notifiable disease to be in a flock. Mycoplasma, unlike the other pathogens which we, we've discussed so far, is bacterial as opposed to viral.

And it can be transmitted via the respiratory route, but it can also be transmitted through mating and via vertical transmission. So there's a lot of backyard keepers out there who think they're maintaining a nice closed flock, but then they will go and buy in hatching eggs, and these can bring in salmonella and mycoplasma. And if you get a chance at the end of this evening's webinar, I'd encourage you to go onto eBay and type in hatching eggs and just see how many entries there are there for sale.

Mycoplasma can cause poor eggshell quality and less eggs, but it more commonly causes these swollen sinuses, and you can see this poor unfortunate golden silky in the photograph here and has got cases in puss within its sinuses, but it rarely causes acute death in birds. So with mycoplasma you tend to get really severe sinusitis. But you tend not to get mortality within it.

So I, I think whenever we're thinking of a notifiable, you're more likely to have not so much swelling of the sinuses, but more actual mortality itself. There is a vaccine for mycoplasma galaticum. Now unfortunately it's not included in the RTIB multi vaccine, but we can get a kill vaccine for mycoplasma galaticum and again it's two injections 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster, and I think again this is well worth doing in a backyard flock.

The next respiratory pathogen to think about is one called infectious laryngotracheitis, abbreviated to ILT and this is a herpes virus which is transmitted via the respiratory route. And like all herpes viruses, it tends to become latent in the nervous system, and, and it will be reactivated or recrudes when the bird is stressed. And what it does is it causes a horrible hemorrhagic trachea or tracheitis.

So you can see in this photograph here the trachea is red, raw and bleeding, and I hate to say it, but the poor unfortunate bird that's affected will choke on the blood clot at the tracheal bifurcation. So it certainly causes dyspnea. In terms of postmortem findings, you will find this horrible hemorrhagic trachea with your clot of blood.

It's not something that we would commonly expect to find with things like infectious bronchitis or a neurotracheitis. So, and this can be pretty nasty. In terms of diagnosis, we tend to diagnose it based on histopathology, and we're looking for e xenophilic intranuclear inclusion bodies.

And in terms of vaccination, there is a vaccine for infectious laryngotracheitis available, but it is a live vaccine and it's very poorly attenuated, so not something I would recommend in a backyard situation. It's not massively common as a as a disease in backyard flux, but just something that's worth keeping at the back of your mind if you were to see a hemorrhagic trachea on a bird with respiratory signs. I'm now going to hand you back to Bruce for a 2nd multiple choice question of the evening.

Here we go, guys. The pole is open. The question is what postmortem finding is highly indicative of Newcastle disease?

You've got a couple of options there, 4 options, so. Click away. I just click on the one that you believe is the correct answer.

As I said before, it's completely anonymous, so No need to be shy. Have a go, and, let's give some feedback to Richard for his fabulous presentation that he's doing and certainly keeping us all focused on what's going on. Right, we'll give you another 10 or 15 seconds.

They're a bit slow in voting on this one, Richard. I'm not sure if it's particularly puzzling or whether they . I just thinking about the The other diseases as well that you've spoken about.

Right. Let's end that poll quickly and share those results. There you go.

Well done, everyone. Well, I think, yeah, you did very, very well, but the correct answer is haemorrhage in the proventriculus. And as I said, it's pretty much pathogonomic for Newcastle disease.

It won't be present in every case, but if you do find that Newcastle disease is probably the most likely pathogen to be causing the problem. I'm now going to move on to another respiratory disease which you might have heard of in vet school, and something that always stuck in my mind was gay worm. And the reason I think most vet students remember it is because it's a Y-shaped worm and the male and female are in permanent populist.

It's about 2 centimetres in length and can affect the trachea. So basically what happens is the birds end up again choking to death on a plug of worms and you can see here this is the trachea of a peacock that has got a plug of gapeworms of the tracheal bifurcation. It's really rare in backyard poultry.

I think it's one of the most over-diagnosed diseases. I get rather frustrated with a lot of backyard keepers coming to me telling me they're birds of a gapeworm whenever it's something much more common like infectious bronchitis, but it's just something worth mentioning. As you can imagine, these birds are pretty dyspneic.

Now gapeworms require an intermediate host to complete their life cycle. They require a slug or a snail, and as such they only affect free ranging poultry, and it's something that tends to infect peafowl and game birds much more commonly than chickens and turkeys, but it can be nonetheless rather deadly in a flock. In terms of prevention and treatment, worming them with flubendazole or fenbendazole tends to do the trick, and we would recommend either doing faecal or meg counts every 3 months or routinely worming the birds with flubendazole or fenbendazole.

I don't think there's much difference in efficacy between the products. I think you tend to find that now we've got Fen Bendazole licenced for poultry, and the price of the wormers has come down considerably, and it's also worth mentioning that to date we have not seen implemented resistance in either backyard or commercial flocks of poultry. I'm not going to hand you back to Bruce for our 3rd multiple choice question of the evening.

Here we go, folks, just to keep you on your toes, a quick follow-up poll on the last one. So this one's question says, a backyard hen with swollen sinuses is presented to you. Her flock mates are developing similar symptoms.

The birds are otherwise bright. What is your most likely pathogen? A, avian influenza, B, Newcastle disease, C infectious bronchitis, and D, mycoplasma galaepticum.

Right, let's give those answers up to you. Excellent. Well done, everyone.

Yeah, the correct answer is mycoplasma galaepticum. I think we've got severe sinusitis and the birds aren't dying. Mycoplasma is much more likely than notifiable avian disease and even much more likely than infectious bronchitis.

You can of course get COVID infection and you can get a respiratory disease complex. And, but in general terms, if you've got a notifiable and and it's killing the birds, that'll be the issue that you pick up on. But I think in terms of birds that are relatively bright but got sinusitis and mycoplasma is certainly the most likely differential.

But probably what you all wanted to hear tonight wasn't me going through a list of various respiratory diseases and poultry and because they all manifest very similarly depending on the the host species and certainly it can be very different, difficult to differentiate them on clinical presentation or on postmortem examination. But really what you want is a list of questions to try and run through either in your head or on a bit of paper when you're presented with a backyard chicken or you're going to see a backyard flock with respiratory signs and particularly when the owner is worried that there is a notifiable infection in the flock. So the first question that I would ask the owner is, were the birds vaccinated within the last year?

So if the birds have been vaccinated, it does make notifiable diseases much more likely because you've almost ruled out the common respiratory pathogens like infectious bronchitis and avian na tracheitis. Similarly, if they've had the killed vaccine, they will likely have been covered for Newcastle disease as well. So really it starts to point towards avian influenza.

But it only really works if you have an annual booster. So if the birds were vaccinated 5 years ago when the owner bought them, then you would almost treat them as non-vaccinated birds. Certainly expatriate chickens when they arrive and they're re-homed, you tend to find that they they were vaccinated when they were 16 weeks of age, and the owners might not get them until they're about 60 to 70 weeks of age.

So by that stage, the immunity has pretty much disappeared for these pathogens. It's always worth asking the owner, have they had any recent additions to the flock or whether or not they've taken some birds to a show. And probably a biggie really for you all is whether or not there's more than 3 dead birds.

I think in a flock of maybe 10 or 15 chickens, it's not uncommon to have one bird die, and it may be bad luck to have 2 birds pass away. But if you start to get 3 or more dead birds within a short space of time, and I'm talking here probably about 3 weeks, you start to worry. And certainly, you know, I think if more than one bird died within the space of maybe 10 days within a flock, I would highly recommend that a postmortem examinations carried out.

Now I've done several webinars, many of which have included postmortem and techniques. So if you're happy to do that on your own, that's brilliant, or if not, to get some birds and brought into a local veterinary laboratories agency for postmortem examination because I think you want an explanation, and it may be something very simple like red mite, coxidosis, or blackhead, but at least then you can kind of put your mind at ease. Always ask do the rest of the flock of kill.

Again, if you've got 1 or 2 dead chickens and the rest of the birds are running around quite happily, it's not really likely to be notifiable. I get a bit more nervous when the rest of the flock. Another really important question is, are there nervous signs?

So again, if you've got one chicken with nervous signs, it may just be bad luck. It could be a bacterial meningitis. But if you've got nervous signs in more than one bird and mortality or respiratory signs, I would get very nervous that there is something rather nasty in the flock.

So for me, nervous signs and more than 2 or 3 dead birds in the flock in quite a short time frame would be red flags. The postmortem findings are generally very useless unless you find haemorrhages in the proven ventriculus, which would indicate Newcastle disease. Now another thing which sounds quite obvious, but some people forget is, it's always worth going on the DEFRA website to find out if there is currently known circulating strains of notifiable avian disease in the UK.

If it's the middle of summer and there's no notifiable disease circulating within the UK, then I think you'd be pretty unlucky to have it in a backyard flock. But if it's the middle of winter time and if you go on the DA website and they say we've had 3 cases of notifiable avian influenza in chickens in the UK, then that should make you a little bit more worried. And I think it's fair to say that a lot of the time when we do find notifiable avian disease, it doesn't make it onto the BBC News and it doesn't necessarily make it into the Guardian or any other news publications.

So always do have a quick flick on the website if you've got any concerns. And obviously, as with all potential notifiable if about to give animal health a call, but I would think that they would be pretty much going through these questions here. So the key things, as I said, are nervous signs.

More than 2 or 3 dead birds, and if we know that there's notifiable disease circulating in the UK at that time. I just wanted to mention a little bit about the legal requirements for keeping chickens as well. Obviously, as I said, if you suspect it, you've got to call animal health.

But if a keeper has over 50 chickens, ducks, or turkeys, and that's the whole lot added together so they could have 10 ducks, 10 turkeys, and 30 chickens, then they must register with Animal Health on their website, and that's free of charge. For keepers with less than 50 birds, this is entirely optional. But I would strongly recommend that keepers with any chickens, whether it's 1 or 1000 register with animal health, because it means if there is an outbreak, then DA can go and work out who is in the protection zone and the surveillance zone and go and knock on doors and check that their birds are OK.

So I think it's really, really important that people do register on the Great Britain poultry register. Making life easier, I think one of the things I learned in life is to try and make life as simple as possible. There's no point in trying to be a hero, and I think that the key thing for me is to make sure that all of your poultry clients vaccinate annually with this RTIB multi vaccine.

The good thing is that a vial is typically about 100 quid and it has 500 doses. So if you're going to give the birds two jabs 4 weeks apart, you can probably use the same vial. And also you'll be able to vaccinate 250 birds.

You could get all your poultry clients maybe in the month of January or whichever month you choose to all come in with the chickens, so you can use the same vial and and it works out relatively economical and it's half a mil into the breast muscle. And obviously don't, oh sorry, discourage your owners from feeding their birds outside. It's amazing the number of chicken keepers that will go and scatter some grain in the run or the range area for the chickens to encourage them to go out and peck in the soil, but this does encourage wild birds and vermin for that matter, which can potentially then come in and defecate on the range and then infect or backward flocks.

And don't encourage wild waterfowl as well. I guess for people with ducks and ponds that can be a bit of a problem whereby wild ducks, geese, swans will all come in and land on the pond and again potentially infect our backyard flocks. I'm now going to hand you back to Bruce for our 4th multiple choice question of the evening.

This is a this is a free gift to everybody, Richard. What is the maximum number of poultry a keeper can have without registering with DRA? This is not what Richard recommends.

He said, even if they've got one, he would recommend them registering. But what is the legal requirement for DEFRA? What number?

Richard, you're gonna be pleased with this one. Everybody's listening to you. Right.

Let's share that. There you go, Richard. Excellent.

Well done, everyone. I'm, I'm really pleased that we we all got that right because I think that's really, really important and something that there's still a large number of backer keepers out there that they're not really aware of it. So I'm not going to talk about what happens in a suspected case.

So I think everyone's got on their head that when they call in DEFRA to a notifiable disease case or a suspected notifiable disease case, it's like an episode of Ghostbusters where men and women in white suits rock up and they, they come in and and gas your chickens. It's not quite like that. And generally whenever the animal health officer comes out, they will declare what is known as a temporary control zone.

So this is just a 1 kilometre zone. And animal health will restrict movement of the birds, the bedding, and the eggs off the premises. Now, generally people aren't going to be moving chickens on a regular basis, and the same with the with the litter or the bedding, but certainly if people are selling eggs at a farm gate, that's got to stop if we suspect notifiable disease on the site until DEFRA has investigated it.

Once it is confirmed as notifiable avian disease, either high path avian influenza or Newcastle disease virus, then our 3K surveillance or protection zone and our 10K surveillance zone are put in place. And within these zones there are varying restrictions on the movements of birds, eggs, and bedding, and the bedding is probably more important for commercial poultry whereby we'll be cleaning the flock out and depending on whether it's meat chickens or laying chickens, but between every 6 weeks and every year. Now these restrictions vary depending on whether it's Newcastle disease or avian influenza, and if it is avian influenza based upon which strain the avian influenza is.

So if it's low path AI or paramyxovirus, then they don't do anything. But if you've got, say for example, a H7N1 strain of avian influenza, then they will want licences to move the birds on and off premises within the SZ and PZs and similarly they may wish to have licences for the movement of eggs and poultry meat potentially. And if we've got the big bad strain, the H5N1, then the restrictions are even more draconian.

But the good thing is at this point, animal health will take control, and they will go and let you know what needs to be done. It has to be said that the affected flock will be euthanized by animal health, and unfortunately, although there is compensation for killing healthy birds, there's no compensation for killing infected flocks. And additionally, any compensation is solely based on the commercial value of the birds.

There's no sentimental value included in the valuation of the flock. DeR may decide to do firebreak culling within the PZ. Now, generally they don't do this, but they have got the powers to go in there and go to other poultry farms within that zone and go and then euthanize birds.

Now there is exemption for some rare breeds survival trust endangered or critically endangered breeds and in exceptional circumstances, but this is not something that Defra have done so far, but there is a little bit of flexibility within there. Now one of the reasons whenever we get a notifiable disease outbreak that it's so important to be in the DA and Great Britain poultry register is that animal health will know where all the poultry flocks within the SZ and PZs are, and they can go out there and they can check in on the owners to see whether the birds are fit and healthy or whether or not they want to go and carry out any testing. Because there are a large number of backyard keepers not on the Great Britain poultry register, in some instances, the animal health officers have literally went door to door to find out if people have got backyard poultry.

And I do understand from a keeper's point of view that you'd probably rather stay under the radar because you don't want people knocking on your door potentially coming in to diagnose something in your chickens and then to go and euthanize them. But you've also got to think of the greater good of poultry both commercially and in terms of pet chickens, because I think that if If you're harbouring notifiable avian disease in the backyard flock, you could be acting as a reservoir for thousands of other birds, and I think probably the experience we're undergoing now with COVID-19 will make people a little bit more appreciative and offered that you're not just trying to protect your own flock, you're also trying to protect the flock of other people as well. Now, what's really interesting is, once the, the birds have been euthanized, then animal health will undertake primary cleaning and disinfection.

And basically they will remove the litter and the dead birds, and these will be rendered. But after that, there is a requirement for the owners to carry out secondary cleaning and disinfection to the satisfaction of DEFRA, and that is all the description that is given. So the next question you'd very rightly ask is, what the heck is secondary cleaning this infection to the satisfaction of DEFRA?

And unfortunately that varies depending on the individual DEFRA official. But normally what it means is washing and scrubbing the chicken coop and then spraying it with a disinfectant. Now in commercial flocks, they might even wash the sheds with hot water and they tend to dismantle all the all the parts of the sheds.

They can adequately clean them. But with backyard chickens, I would recommend what was being done in the photograph there and that the coop is set alight because I think it's much cheaper and easier and a lot less stress to burn the coop and to start again. That way you're guaranteed they've got rid of the of any notifiable avian disease.

These coupes, although they might cost a couple 100 quid, maybe even a grand. It's a lot cheaper than going and properly getting a team of people in to clean and disinfect the coop and then to pay for Deer to come and inspect it. Now one of the things that's very frustrating, I guess from a commercial point of view is that the UK exports quite a lot of breeding poultry and hatching eggs globally, and as soon as we've got an outbreak of notifiable avian disease, some importing countries will put the brakes on taking birds and eggs from the UK.

And it's not until 60 days after our cleaning and disinfection, the secondary cleaning and disinfection is complete, that they will relax their restrictions on imports from the UK. Now if the owner decides, I don't want to be bothered doing secondary cleaning and disinfection or I can't afford it, as is the case in certain circumstances, then it holds the UK's commercial poultry industry to ransom. So there was some legislation and That come into place relatively recently and as long as the owners sign a bit of paper to say that they're not going to restock the holding for the next year, then the clock will start ticking for the 60 days to allow our exports to continue again.

So backyard flocks can have quite a bit of an impact on the commercial poultry sector if they don't do secondary cleaning disinfection or if they don't. And sign a declaration to state that they will not restock. But after a year, the keeper can, and I suspect having had the emotional trauma of having a notifiable disease in the backyard flock would probably put people off keeping chickens forever.

The final thing that I wanted to to touch on this evening, ladies and gentlemen, is really important is housing orders. So one of the things that DA can do in both the SZ and TZ is to mandate that everybody houses their chickens, OK? Now, in certain circumstances, as we had a couple of years ago, DEFRA can mandate a housing order for the entirety of the UK, so not just for the SZ and TZ's for the whole country.

The problem that that imposes is twofold. One, some people, and we can see in this top photograph here, have got relatively small chicken sheds and to shut the birds in this shed would be absolutely cruel. And potentially would lead to stress and pecking.

And the other issue is for people selling free range and organic eggs, eggs cannot be sold as free range and organic, and you may remember whenever we did in the housing order that those little stickers appeared on the egg boxes in supermarkets stating that for their own health and welfare, these birds, although they're kept in free range farms, have been temporarily housed. So what DEFRA decided to do after that, obviously the free range egg industry wasn't very happy about it all, was that they decided to introduce what's known as higher risk areas. So if you go on the DEFRA website, they have got Map of what they deem higher risk areas across the UK and these maps change on an annual basis.

So if there is bird flu circulating in a number of sites in the UK, DEFRA may decide that farms or holdings in the higher risk areas must house their birds, and people out with their areas can let their birds out as normal. And Obviously this has caused quite a bit of resentment for the farmers and backyard keepers within these higher risk zones, but unfortunately, I suppose it's for the greater good. So these higher risk zones tend to naturally be around the coast and around places like Slimbridge or any other wetlands.

So in terms of housing orders, what exactly constitutes housing your chickens? Well, if you're really strict, you would say the birds must be completely locked in the coop. But I think that that's particularly extreme.

As long as the range area has got netting or or it's covered to stop wild birds. Coming into direct contact with your poultry, it is acceptable for housing orders. So that range area in the top photograph, if the keepers were to put netting over the top of it to stop wild birds having access to their chickens, that would be deemed sufficient for a housing order.

You can see in this bottom photograph you can see that there's some snow, and what the owners have done is they've created a veranda outside the chicken shed, so they've got a little cupboard area with some mesh down the side, and they've bedded it up with straw. So the chickens are outside in the fresh air, but actually they cannot come into contact with wild birds and they cannot come into contact with the grass. And these housing orders don't have to stay in place for any defined period of time.

It's entirely up to the chief veterinary officer who will take advice from the experts at Weybridge and we'll obviously be in discussion with the commercial poultry industry and MPs and various other stakeholders. So these housing orders are not necessarily in place for a defined period of time. Our PZs tend to be in place for 21 days and our SZs tend to be in place for 30 days, but again, there's quite a bit of flexibility, and the reasoning for the 21 day mark for the PZ to remain in place is that is the maximum incubation period of various strains of avian influenza and of Newcastle disease.

So I think ladies and gentlemen, it's time for our 5th and final question of evening. And Richard, this is a good one to finish on because yeah, you're gonna have to have been paying attention very, very well to be able to answer this one. So which statement is false is in the case of an AI outbreak?

That is, which statement is false? Don't get caught out. So, yeah, we'll give you a little bit longer on this one, to to answer because it is a little bit more of a complex question.

Yeah, Richard, it's interesting to hear you saying that, you know, the, the backyard people would rather remain under the radar, but it certainly would save them a whole lot of hassles, but it, it, it can terribly, terribly negatively influence the greater good if they're not. Yeah, no, definitely. Right, the voting is much slower this time.

Come on guys, as I've said before, it is anonymous, . Take a stab, take a shot, and let's see where. Where we get to.

Another 5 seconds because it is a tough one. Right, let's end that poll and share those results. There you go, Richard.

Well done, everyone. So yeah, basically backyard flocks are not exempt from euthanasia. There are some loopholes surrounding rare breeds of poultry, and I think I'm right in saying, and I could be wrong because I'm not a cattle vet by any stretch of the imagination, but I think with blue tongue and foot and mouth, there were some cases looked at where there were certain rare breeds of cattle and in terms of exports of rare breeds.

Of chickens that can continue as normal and some very small flocks of rare breeds can be treated almost along the lines of exotic birds, and they don't technically come under the normal legislation that we would find for larger flocks. But then well done to everyone this evening on the the poll questions. I'd like to thank you all very much for your time this evening, and then if anyone's got any questions, I think we've got A few minutes to to do our best to answer them.

Thank you. Yeah, Richard, that was absolutely fabulous and thank you for such a good question to end on. That was really, really good.

And I think the fact that most of the people, or 2/3 of the people got it right, shows that your message has certainly got home to the majority of people. So thank you for your time tonight and thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. Catherine has asked what size, I think you did answer this, but it came through before you, you answered it.

What size vials does the RTIB vaccine come in and what are the costs? OK, so, Catherine, the RTIB multi vaccine comes in 500 dose vials and typically it's, it's about 100 pounds. I mean, it'll vary depending on where you get your, your product from, but that's what you're, you're looking at paying.

And because it's a kill vaccine, you, you could, you know, get away with vaccinating a lot of birds with it over, you know, sort of a week or two it'll keep relatively well. OK, so I, like most of our commercial products that are available, there's broach dates and that sort of thing, but you could at least stretch it out. Yes, no, definitely.

Excellent. Catherine's also asked, would you recommend bloods or oral nasal swabs with investigating respiratory outbreaks? And which laboratory do you prefer?

OK, so I would recommend probably that you use swabs of the cranal theft. So basically in the roof of the mouth if you've got active clinical signs, but obviously if the birds have been ill and recovered, and we would go down the serology route and carry out blood testing. And I would tend to recommend citech laboratories in Shropshire.

They were developed as a pig in poultry lab, and they're relatively competitively priced for screening for respiratory pathogens in poultry, but typically a PCR test for a given disease would come to about 30 pounds per disease. Again, it will vary, but that's roughly what you're you're looking at. And a lot of them, have got respiratory disease panels as well.

So if you, if you send samples into Scitech and you tick, the box, they'll they'll do all the common respiratory pathogens, which is really helpful. Yeah, that's very handy, isn't it? Another question that's come in is, what is the best way to get the latest news on AI?

So there's two ways of going about it. One is to go on the animal health website, but also if, and although you don't have chickens, if you sign up to the Great Britain poultry register, you'll automatically get updates from DEFRA on notifiable disease within the UK. And additionally, there's Also a subscription service which is free on the DFA website whereby you can subscribe for avian notifiable disease and updates as well.

So if you either sign up to the Great Britain poultry registry, even though you don't have got chickens, and that's one way of doing it, or you can subscribe on the animal health website. Oh really worthwhile place to get the information and they'll send it to you as well, I should imagine. Yeah, it's all coming via via email.

Yeah, perfect. Well, Richard, that's all we have time for tonight and I'd like to once again thank you so much for your time and for your fabulous presentation. As always with all the good speakers, you make it seem so easy until we're out there on the coalface.

Well, thank you very much, everyone, and stay safe. Thanks folks from my side and my controller in the background. Thanks very much for making things happen.

And from me, it's good night everybody.