Good evening everybody and welcome to this evening's webinar brought to you by the Chicken Vett. And it's entitled The Sneezing hen. My name is Bruce Stevenson and I am going to be chairing the session tonight.
Just a little bit of housekeeping. We do have some poll questions. We'll guide you through those for those people who haven't been on a webinar before.
As they come up, we'll talk you through what to do. It's really easy. You just click on the option.
And it'll come through and then we'll reveal the results afterwards. If you do have any questions for Richard, our presenter tonight, if you just hover your cursor over the screen, a toolbar will come up. There's a Q&A screen, or Q&A box.
Just click on it, type it in there. It'll all come through to me and we'll hold them all over to the end and Richard will then be able to answer them for you. So Richard Jackson grew up on a turkey farm and had a keen interest in breeding and showing rare birds of chickens and ducks.
He graduated from Glasgow Vet School in 2010 and has worked at Saint David's poultry team ever since then. He became the clinical director back in 2013. And Richard has run many training courses and given several webinars on both management and diseases of backyard poultry.
So there's nobody better to talk to us on the sneezing hen than Richard. Richard, welcome to the webinar vet and over to you. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm going to talk to you all this evening about sneezing chickens. Although my title's slightly deceptive because at the end of the webinar, I'm going to cover a little bit about respiratory disease in turkeys and in waterfowl. Respiratory disease in backyard flocks is a relatively common presentation in mixed and small animal practise alongside enteric disease, peritonitis, and red mites.
I hope you'll all appreciate from the chicken on the first slide that you can see that this flight of he has got a slightly cloudy eye and her face looks slightly puffy. So this would be a very classical presentation of respiratory disease. One of the great things about owners is when they bring in these backyard chickens, they tend to come in in cardboard boxes, and with the stress of travelling, any respiratory noise tends to be accentuated and is relatively easy to pick up when you open the box.
So the first thing whenever approaching respiratory disease in backyard poultry is to ask the normal history questions you would ask for a cat or a dog. But it's really important to remember that chickens, ducks, and turkeys are all flock animals, and as such, the chances are that the respiratory pathogen will have infected more than one bird. So always inquire about the health status of the rest of the flock.
What makes respiratory disease slightly unusual in poultry is that the ciliated epithelial cells of the trachea, which respiratory pathogens attack, is very similar to the epithelial cells lining the eggshell gland. So a common presentation of respiratory disease in backyard flocks is pale eggs, or indeed wrinkly eggshells or eggshells that look like they've been coated in a castor sugar. And in some occasions, you'll actually find that there's eggshell abnormalities without overt signs of respiratory disease such as sneezing or a nasal or ocular discharge.
Now, interestingly, again, the ciliated epithelium of the trachea is rather similar to some of the cells found in the avian kidney. And another common presentation with respiratory disease in chickens is polyurea. Now because chickens both urinate and defecate in one motion, you tend to find that many owners wrongly report polyurea as being diarrhoea.
So always ask about the enteric health of the birds. In many cases, respiratory disease is precipitated either by people bringing in new chickens, or the other common scenario is they brought their bird to a show last week and this week it's sneezing, and now some of the rest of the birds in the flock are sneezing. Whenever you're clinically examining a chicken with respiratory disease, you're looking for swelling of the face, and there's an intraorbital fines that runs from Daenerys underneath the eye, and this can really swell up in severe cases of respiratory disease.
Sometimes, particularly in turkeys, when they get respiratory disease, they wipe their noses on their backs, and if you've got a white turkey, or indeed a white chicken, you can sometimes find that that they've got dirty backs where they've been wiping their nostrils. Please remember whenever auscultating for respiratory disease in chickens that unlike the mammalian respiratory system, chickens have got rather small lungs, but they have a rather extensive network of air sacs which line both the thoracic and the abdominal cavities. So when auscultating a chicken with respiratory disease, you need to listen as far cranially as a thoracic inlet and as far caudally as the vent.
And you want to go as doorly as you can and as ventrally as you can right down to the sternum. In general terms, the most commonplace of a chicken to hear respiratory sounds is actually in the caudal ventral air sacs because this is where any fluid tends to drain into. Always warn owners that many of these diseases that we're going to discuss this evening involve a carrier state, and they tend to recrudece when the bird is stressed, such as rehoming it or taking it to a show.
And remember that many of the conditions involve several pathogens. So in cattle, for example, we talk about the respiratory disease complex, and chickens are no different. The other thing I would say is that some respiratory disease in backward flu is precipitated by poor management.
Owners are fixated with keeping their pet chickens warm, but backyard flocks tend to have very good fe their cover, which will protect chickens, ducks, and turkeys from the cold. What birds need is fresh air but not draughts, and if an owner keeps having recurring issues with respiratory disease despite vaccination or treatment, it may be worth visiting the holding to find out whether or not there's good airflow in the coop and to make sure that they're not overstocking the coop either. Now there's a whole plethora of differentials for respiratory disease in chickens, and I think looking at the list, sometimes we tend to get a little bit nervous because that's a heck of a lot of diseases to cover, but I'm going to break them down.
And the most two important respiratory diseases of backyard chickens are infectious bronchitis virus and mycoplasma galaepticum. I will briefly cover avian rhinotracheitis virus. Infectious laryngotracheitis, both of which are relatively uncommon.
And I will touch on both Newcastle disease and avian influenza, particularly as AI has been in the news recently. I'm not going to discuss gapeworms in backyard flocks simply because they are incredibly rare in chickens. It's much more of a problem in game birds.
Unfortunately, many owners immediately jump on the gap worm bandwagon as soon as the birds have got respiratory disease, but flubendazole, which is a common and wormer used in micro flocks, will easily get rid of gapeworms in chickens. So as long as the birds are routinely wormed, gapeworms shouldn't be a major consideration for respiratory disease. Now one of the other problems with Backyard flocks getting respiratory disease is that when the ciliated epithelial cells of the trachea are damaged, environmental bacteria, which the birds will inhale in the coop, can reach all the way deep down into both the lungs and the air sacs, where you tend to get secondary E.
Coli and in rare cases, pasturella infection. I was very fortunate back about 5 years ago to get some funding to look at respiratory disease in backyard flocks. And what you can see from this chart is that in 3/4 of cases of respiratory disease, we have got more than 1 pathogen involved.
And interestingly, The only pathogen that we tended to find on its own in respiratory disease was infectious bronchitis, and pretty much all apart from 6% of cases of respiratory disease involved infectious bronchitis virus. So it is, if you like, the keystone in all of this, and our control of respiratory disease needs to focus predominantly on infectious bronchitis. Infectious bronchitis is a coronavirus, and like other coronaviruses, it mutates readily.
So this means that you get multiple serotypes of it, and just because a bird has been exposed to and recovered from one strain does not mean that a year or two later, the bird won't go down with another strain of infectious bronchitis. It is spread via the aerosol and faecal oil routes and can survive in the environment for several weeks. The incubation period for infectious bronchitis is relatively short, at between 1 and 3 days.
Infectious bronchitis causes your traditional respiratory signs, but additionally, Infectious bronchitis attacks the eggshell gland rather severely, and what we tend to find is that we get pale eggs with very poor quality eggshells. Now this damage may be permanent or it may be temporary, and unfortunately you cannot tell at the time of presentation whether the damage is permanent or temporary. Now unfortunately, if young birds get infectious bronchitis before females become or reach puberty, Then you can get permanent damage and scarring of the oviduct.
And what you tend to find is that when these birds come into lay, their oviduct has lost patency, and the egg yolks accumulate in the abdomen rather than being laid, and these birds are known as internal layers. Over time, these internally laid egg yolks will be absorbed by the bird's body, but she will be laying into her abdomen faster than she will be absorbing the egg yolk, and what you tend to find is that the bird builds up a belly full of eggs. And in order to alleviate the pressure, the birds adopt an upright penguin-like stance which you can see in the photographs here.
Now having a belly full of egg yolks isn't a particularly good idea because if any bacteria such as E. Coli get into the abdomen and they reach this mass of egg yolk, it's providing the E. Coli with an excellent growth medium.
So you tend to get a secondary E. Coli peritonitis. Always remember that infectious bronchitis can also cause severe nephritis in chickens, causing polyurea and potentially dehydration.
There's no latency for infectious bronchitis in virus in chickens, however, one serotype is not necessarily cross-protective against others. When it comes to prevention of infectious bronchitis, vaccines are the mainstay. And as with many diseases, we have the choice of a live vaccine or a kill the vaccine.
Now for backyard flocks, I tend to recommend using the kill the vaccine. We would recommend that birds are injected with the kill vaccine twice initially, so 2 jabs 4 weeks apart, and the killed vaccine will keep in the fridge for 28 days. So although the vaccine comes in a rather large vial, you can inject the lock once, put the vaccine in the fridge, and then re-inject them 4 weeks later.
And then you want to do an annual booster. Another benefit to the kill the vaccine for infectious bronchitis is that it's polyvalent, and the vaccine will cover the common strains of infectious bronchitis that we find in the UK. Live vaccines obviously don't keep in the fridge once you reconstitute them and all of the live vaccines that we've got in the UK are monovalent, meaning you'd have to do several live vaccines to cover all of the common strains.
For people breeding backyard chickens, I would recommend giving the first injection at about 6 weeks of age, depending on the breed. Certainly with smaller birds such as phantoms, you don't want to be giving that first vaccine to birds under about 6 weeks where they're rather small, and that injection is into the breast muscle. The next most common condition or respiratory pathogen of backro flux is mycoplasma galaepticum.
A mycoplasma, like infectious bronchitis, it's fed or spread via the aerosol route, but it's also spread through copulus. So an infected cockerel can spread mycoplasma right throughout the flock. Mycoplasma can also be transmitted vertically, and whenever you're done with this evening's webinar, I would encourage you all to go onto eBay and type in hatching eggs, and you will be absolutely astounded at the range of rare breeds that you can buy hatching eggs off from across Europe.
And there's relatively little in the way of policing office. So owners with a closed flock can go and buy eggs from, say, Germany, thinking they're maintaining the closed status of their flock, but actually these eggs they buy in may contain salmonella or mycoplasma. Mycoplasma has got a relatively short incubation period of as little as a few days.
And as with infectious bronchitis, you get the classical respiratory disease signs such as swollen infraorbital sinus and a nasal ocular discharge. Now in chronic mycoplasma cases, you get this horrible Caseus sinusitis, and you can see in this photograph from this golden silky hen that her infraorbital sinus is full of puss. Now unlike mammalian abscesses, the pus in birds is rock solid, and I think unfortunately vets, including myself when I started, had this image whereby you could lance the sinus of a chicken and squeeze it, and all the puss would come out.
That is certainly not the case, and cases sinusitis of backyard chickens is a life threatening condition. As with infectious bronchitis, mycoplasma affects the eggshell gland to cause pale eggs with poor eggshell quality. But unlike infectious bronchitis, the damage is usually temporary and will resolve with treatment.
One of the downsides to mycoplasma galasepticum is that it establishes latency in the chicken, and it will reek for death when the bird is stressed. So mycoplasma is a typical disease of show birds whereby when you take them to the show, you stress them and the mycoplasma comes out. As with infectious bronchitis, I would recommend using a killed vaccine for protection.
Again, 2 jabs 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster. And if you're clever, you could perhaps have January as your vaccination month and get all your backyard clients to come in in the month of January to vaccinate your birds or their birds so that when you open a 500 dose file, you can use that vial for everyone's birds that come in to try and keep costs down. Avian rhinotracheitis virus is a metapneumovirus and it is spread via the aerosol route.
Incubation is again in as little as a few days and often causes respiratory signs alongside mycoplasma and infectious bronchitis. Like the other respiratory pathogens, ART will cause damage to the eggshell glands, but this again tends to be temporary. The good things about ART are that it doesn't establish latency and immunity tends to be protective for life.
In terms of protection against ART, the infectious bronchitis kill vaccines also contain avian rhinotracheitis antigens. So if you vaccinate for IB, you will also cover your Avian and rhinotracheitis virus. Infectious laryngotracheitis is a herpes virus of chickens, and it is spread via the aerosol route.
And you can see in the photograph below that this is the trachea of an infected chicken where you've got this horrible hemorrhagic tracheitis, and unfortunately the poor affected bird tends to choke on a blood clot which it blocks up the tracheal bifurcation. Infectious laryngotracheitis, in common with other herpes viruses, tends to establish latency and again will recrudece when the birds are stressed. ILT is relatively uncommon in backyard flocks, and I wouldn't recommend vaccinating for it because the vaccine is only available in the live form and it's very poorly attenuated, meaning if you incorrectly vaccinate some of your birds, the vaccine can revert to virulence and can almost be worse than the primary disease itself.
It's really important that I mention the two notifiable diseases of poultry. The first is Newcastle disease. The Newcastle disease is caused by a paramyxovirus and is spread via the aerosol and faecal oral roots.
Historically, Newcastle disease has been associated with waterfowl, and thankfully, we don't see that much of Newcastle disease in Europe. Newcastle disease varies in both pathogenicity and its tissue trophism. So we can see in the photograph of the top left of the screen that we have got viscerotrophic Newcastle disease causing an emerald green diarrhoea.
But this is by no means pathogonomic for Newcastle disease in poultry. You can get emerald green diarrhoea with a whole host of enteric conditions. Newcastle disease can cause severe petitiation of the proventriculous or stomach of a chicken.
And if you look at the bottom left-hand photograph, you can see at the top of the proventriculis, there's these petechial haemorrhages. These lesions are pathogonomic for Newcastle disease. So if you see them, you can be pretty certain that that's what you're dealing with.
In the top right hand corner, you can see that we've got a photograph of some lymphoid tissue in the intestine, which is severely hemorrhagic. And in the bottom right-hand photograph you can see these pale, wrinkly eggshells, which again are associated with many respiratory pathogens, not just Newcastle disease. Newcastle disease can cause nervous signs in chickens alongside respiratory signs and diarrhoea.
And in very acute cases, you'll only see death. A Newcastle disease is notifiable. And whenever I talk about avian influenza in the next slide, I will give you a bit of an indication as to how to work out whether you've got a notifiable disease or just a normal respiratory pathogen of backyard chickens.
So the big one of course is avian influenza, and it's an orthomyxovirus, and again, like Newcastle disease, it spread via the respiratory and faecal oral roots and again tends to be associated with migratory birds. It can cause respiratory signs, so you can see that the chicken in photograph has got a cyanotic face and indeed there's some swelling and edoema there. But in many cases, AI just presents a sudden death.
Unlike in Newcastle disease, there are no pathogonomic PM findings. And avian influenza is indeed notifiable. For commercial poultry, which I deal with quite a lot of the time, we've got thresholds in place.
If you lose more than 0.3% of your birds in one day, you need to call the vet. The problem is for someone with 5 backyard chickens, if one of the birds dies, they've lost 20% of their flock in one day.
And I have spoken to deaf for vets about how we approach backyard flocks with respiratory disease. And what they're telling me is if owners are losing more than 1 or 2 chickens and the rest of the flock looks severely ill, then indeed maybe we need to be thinking about notifiables. You also need to take into context whether or not there's avian influenza circulating in the UK at the time you're presented with the case.
So going back a few months ago when AI was being found in wild birds, I think it would be very fair to say that if you had a flock of severely ill backyard chickens, AI would be on the differentials list. But now, when AI seems to have died down, I think it would be much less common and much less likely. The other thing to remember with backyard chickens as opposed to commercial flock is, most commercial flocks are highly well vaccinated against mycoplasma and infectious bronchitis, and that means that if they get these pathogens, the signs are mild, whereas when they get Newcastle disease and avian influenza, the signs are rather severe.
But with backyard chickens, because most of them are not vaccinated for infectious bronchitis and mycoplasma. These pathogens can be just as severe and as deadly upon presentation as avian influenza. What I wanted to show you here in This slide was the air sacs of the respiratory tract.
So in the left-hand photograph, you can see the chicken's heart there clearly. At the bottom of the photograph, you can see the salmon pink lungs. And on the right hand side of the photograph, you can see what looks like a sheet of cling film, which is the air sack.
So these air sacs act like a set of bellows throughout the chicken's body, and they will force air through the lungs. What I really wanted to show you in this photograph was just how thin the air sacs are and how poorly vascularized they are, and it means that if any damage occurs to the ciliated epithelial cells of the trachea, you will tend to find that you can get air sacculitis relatively easily. And because there's a poor blood supply to the air sacs, it's very difficult for the bird to fight off bacteria which reaches the air sacs.
The other anatomical misfortune of chickens is that their ovary is relatively closely placed to their air sacs, meaning that air sacculitis can very quickly become eggio peritonitis. And we can see in the bird on the right-hand photograph that we've got its breast muscle there, which is bright red and septicmic. We've got the bird's liver, and you can see the bird's right liver lobe is projecting way beyond the thorax, which would be suggestive of septicemia.
And you've got this horrible mass of egg yolk and pus mixed in. So a sequel to respiratory disease in backyard chickens is peritonitis, and by the time that a bird has got a belly full of puss, time is running out. Because you will never get good antimicrobial penetration into the mass of puss.
So for this poor chicken on the right hand side, it was the end of life for it I'm afraid, there was nothing we could have done. So you need to warn owners that peritonitis is a realistic secondary consequence to respiratory disease, and that tends to be how chickens die. The vast majority of birds with respiratory disease tend not to die due to the respiratory pathogen itself.
It tends to be the secondary E. Coli peritonitis. I'm going to hand you back to Bruce for our first poll question of the evening.
Right, folks, quite simply, I've launched the poll. All you need to do is click on the answer that best suits what you believe is the right answer. And we'll give you a a couple of minutes or a minute or so to vote.
And then we'll close the poll and Richard will be able to see the results and he can chat us through those. So simply just give us a click on whatever you think is the correct answer. Alright guys, a couple of stragglers still not voted yet.
5 more seconds and then we'll close the poll. Right, Richard, I think that's all we're going to get at this stage. So there's your results.
60% think it's infectious bron bronchitis and 40% think it's mycoplasma. Well, I'm glad, ladies and gentlemen, that between you all, you certainly got the two most common respiratory pathogens, and of course the most common one is infectious bronchitis. And if owners are only prepared to vaccinate against one respiratory pathogen, infectious bronchitis should be the one they go for.
In terms of diagnosis of which pathogens you've got involved, postmortem findings tend not to be very specific. Serology is useful if you do paired serology, and you want to leave at least 2 weeks between sampling, but you do ideally want these paired samples to see if the antibody levels are rising or falling. Although the tests aren't particularly expensive, by the time you go and you test for each pathogen individually, costs can soon mount up.
PCR testing is available now, but you're looking at about 30 pounds per disease per bird. So again, it's relatively expensive. And to my mind, unless the owner is showing or breeding chickens, I don't think it's worth spending the money doing the diagnosed gnostics.
So, more importantly for all of you listening this evening, how do we treat respiratory disease in backyard chickens? Generally speaking, treatment involves antimicrobial therapy. Normally when owners bring a chicken to you, it's unwell and the owners want you to do something.
Now if you think that the chicken really isn't that unwell, you may wish to consider using essential oils. So some of our clients tend to want to use eucalyptus or mint, and they'll either put that in the drinking water or in a bowl of warm water in the coup to help decongest the sinuses a bit like you or I would. When it comes to antimicrobial therapy, there are only 2 antimicrobials with a zero egg withhold for backyard poultry.
One is an oxy tetracycline and the other is iamulin, which is sold under the trade name of Deneguard. Now, those products aren't particularly great in respiratory disease cases, unfortunately. Tulin is excellent against mycoplasma, but it's absolutely rubbish against secondary bacteria such as E.
Coli. So unless you're 100% certain that you've got a primary mycoplasma case with no secondary bacteria involved, I would stay away from Tymulin. So it does mean that potentially we're going to have to go off label and under the cascade prescribe an antimicrobial, which means we have to apply a minimum of a 17 day egg withhold and ideally a 14 day egg withhold.
Traditionally, a lot of vets grabbed flora quinlos, and they tended to go for Betrol. But if you look at a bottle of petrol, it will explicitly state on the label not to be given to birds producing eggs for human consumption. And I think that with recent press, we cannot be using petrol in backyard chickens.
It's fine if they're turkeys or indeed male chickens, but I think for laying hens, petrol is certainly off the list. I should point out we've also got Thailand which acts very similar to Denegaard and again has a zero egg withdrawal, but it really isn't great against secondary E. Coli.
My go to is conventionally the tetracyclines. Now, normally we'd look at an oxy tetracycline, but in our experience, there's an awful lot of resistance in E. Coli to oxy tetracycline out there, so it makes it not a particularly good choice.
Certainly within our practise, we would tend to go for doxycycline, and we would administer that for 5 days, either orally or via injection at 20 milligrammes per kilogramme body weight. This is off licence. However, it's incredibly efficacious against both mycoplasma and E.
Coli. Now the big question is, do you treat all of the birds within the group or just the affected chicken? My approach would generally be if it's one or two birds, I would treat the individuals, and if it's the whole flock, I would, or sorry, if it's more than 2 birds, I would tend to treat the whole flock.
Personally, I prefer to inject chickens rather than putting medication in the water. I think owners are incredibly bad at working out how much water the chicken drinks in a day, and I just think with injections, when you get into the bird, you know the bird's got it antimicrobial, and you're not having to worry whether it's been spilled or the bird's not drinking sufficient quantities. If the case doesn't respond to doxycycline and you do want to use something a bit stronger, then we can cheat when it comes to fluroquinones.
We can use morbisil because there's nothing on the label that indicates it cannot be given to chickens producing eggs for human consumption, so we can put a 14 day egg withhold on chickens treated with mbafloxacin. So there's another question as to whether or not we want to isolate severely affected chickens. To my mind, I would try not to isolate severely affected birds because whenever you reintroduce them to the flock, they tend to get bullied and it destabilises the pecking order.
Please, please, please warn owners that many of these diseases such as mycoplasma and infectious laryngotracheitis involve a carrier state, and you need to warn the owners that if they sell the bird, or indeed they take it to a show, that the disease can recrude. For birds with severe case of sinusitis, as I mentioned when we discussed mycoplasma, and it can be life-threatening. And we can see here in the bottom right-hand photograph of this golden silky, that this fine is incredibly filled with instigated pus.
Now, on the left-hand photograph, I've cut into the sinus to show you just how extensive the sinusitis is and how thick that pus is. The owner thought that we could do look an aesthetic on a chicken, make a small incision under the eye, and squeeze the pus out, but it was endgame for this bird. Sinus surgery in backyard chickens is incredibly complex.
It requires a general anaesthetic and detailed knowledge of the sinus anatomy, and it's a job for an avian specialist. So certainly done in the Southwest, we would refer the chickens to Great Western referrals in Swindon if owners want surgery done on it. It's not something to be done in small animal practise or mixed practise because you tend to find that the sinuses bleed incredibly badly.
Back to Bruce for question too. Right folks, you know how this works. The pole is open.
Simply click on the answer that best suits your, your response. And the question is which common respiratory disease pathogen should not be vaccinated against in backyard flocks? Richard, this one seems to have people stumped.
OK, that's all right. Here we go. Now the votes are starting to come in.
Come on folks, remember the voting is anonymous, so don't feel shy or anything. Give us your opinion. It's it's not a pass or fail.
Right, a few more seconds, couple of stragglers still coming in. Right, let's close that poll and share those results. There you go, Richard.
OK, so we've got quite a bit of a variation in answers. So the disease we do not want to vaccinate against is infectious laryngotracheitis because it's only available in live vaccine form and it reverts to virulence incredibly easily. So the two vaccines we're going to be thinking about are infectious bronchitis and mycoplasma galaepticum.
In terms of prevention of respiratory disease in backward flus, we want to try and source new birds from a disease-free supplier, and ideally source vaccinated birds if you can. Ideally, we would quarantine new birds for 3 weeks if possible, and most owners tend to laugh at me whenever I suggest this. But if owners have got rare breeds and the breeding stock are incredibly valuable, I would strongly recommend it.
Now we were always taught in vet school that we shouldn't vaccinate infected birds, but what I would say is that if you've got parent birds with mycoplasma and you vaccinate them, you will actually decrease the shedding into the progeny. So irrespective of the disease status of the birds, if the owners are insisting on breeding from them, I strongly would recommend vaccinating them, whether they're positive or negative. And we want to keep wild birds away if possible, so that means not feeding the birds outside in the run.
So I think we've covered all the little tips on vaccination. If anyone is really keen to buy respiratory disease vaccines, then MSD and ZEA are very good about supplying them. Back to Bruce for our 3rd poll question.
Right, folks, you know what you're doing now. This one is a little bit more of a difficult question, and it is simply how easy is sinus surgery in chickens with cazia sinusitis? Couple of answers or a couple of options.
Click on the one that you believe is the correct one. Alright it's, we've got them all awake now Richard. They're all voting really really nicely and quickly.
Right, let's end that poll and reveal the answers. There we go. That's really good.
So yeah, the, the answer is it's a procedure best done by an avian specialist under general anaesthetic. And, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone tries it without a lot of expertise and a good team behind you for an anaesthesia. We're now going to move on to respiratory disease in turkeys, and there's quite a lot of people out there that raise a few turkeys for Christmas, and these turkeys will start to be placed in July and August, so we're not too far away from placing these turkey pos.
The most common respiratory disease in turkeys is mycoplasma, and there's lots of different species that affect turkeys, but synovia is the most common species of mycoplasma in turkeys. We've got Avian rhinotracheitis, which again we covered in chickens. We've got pasturella, and then we've got our two notifiables, avian influenza and Newcastle disease.
Now both AI and Newcastle disease are incredibly pathogenic for turkeys. So sometimes with chickens there's a bit of ambiguity as to whether or not we've got AI, Newcastle disease, or IB. But with turkeys, if you get avian influenza or Newcastle disease, it will kill them really rapidly.
So it's very difficult to miss it in turkey flocks even if they're small. I just wanted to talk a little bit about mycoplasma sino in turkeys because it's a little bit different from mycoplasma galaepticum that we get in chickens. So it causes respiratory signs as you see in chickens.
You get the swollen face, the nasal ocular discharge, and a little bit of sneezing. But mycoplasma synovia, as its name implies, attacks the synovial membranes of the joints. So you also get lameness in turkeys with mycoplasma.
Unfortunately, there's no licenced vaccine in the UK. And it's very difficult to treat. And there's a couple of reasons that mycoplasma is difficult to treat in turkeys.
One, it recrudes whenever you take them off the antimicrobial. So that's a problem, you end up giving them several treatments throughout life. The other issue with it is that turkeys are big and it becomes relatively expensive to treat them.
We have to observe withdrawal periods for turkeys, and there's very few licenced products, and those that are licenced tend to have quite long withdrawal times. And unfortunately, as luck would have it, when turkeys get mycoplasma, it tends to be within a few weeks of being killed for Christmas because that's when they're their biggest, and that's when the weather's starting to get cold and miserable again. It's really important that when you treat flocks of turkeys with mycoplasma, that the owners keep medicines records book, especially if they're going to be selling these birds or giving them away for Christmas dinners.
And to be honest with you, if you get really badly affected birds, you're almost best culling them early and potentially, if the carcass is fit for consumption, then the birds can be eaten or sold. Now, a bit like chickens with respiratory disease and mycoplasma, we might be thinking along the lines of using our doxycycline as a treatment, and certainly it's not a bad first port of call. If that fails, I would be thinking about using petrol, and there's no issues with using petrol and turkeys, it's licenced in them, and because we're not going to eat the turkey eggs, there's absolutely no issues.
Avian rhinotracheitis is relatively common as well in turkeys, and again, it causes respiratory signs as per chickens, but it's much more serious. Turkeys are suicidal. From the moment they hatch out the egg until the day you kill them, they're trying to die, whether it's getting eaten or going on hunger strike.
And what tends to kill turkeys with respiratory disease is the fact that they basically sit there and sulk. They refuse to eat and drink, and they just tend to waste away and die that way. Now the good thing about A neuronotracheitis is that you can vaccinate them, and typically we would recommend vaccinating them at least once in their life with a live vaccine.
So this is a bit of a pain in the neck. Now there's only really one strain that they've been on a tracheitis that you need to worry about. And what we would recommend is vaccinating these turkeys at about 1 to 2 weeks of age.
And there's lots of different ways of administering live vaccines to turkeys, but what I would recommend is doing it via eyedrop, and the vaccine suppliers such as MSD and Zooatists can supply you with eyedroppers and a bill you in. And if you eye drop the turkey, at least you know it's got the vaccine, because if you put it in its drinking water or you spray it on the bird, you never quite know if it's got the full dose. And the vaccines are incredibly effective.
Back to Bruce for question 4. Right, folks, your old hat now, you know exactly what to do. This one is, which is the most common mycoplasma species to affect turkeys?
Right, we're getting a good response coming in. Few more stragglers. Come on, folks.
We've got a few fence sitters this time, Richard. They're not committing to anything at the moment. 5 more seconds and then we'll close the pole.
Right, let's close that poll and the good thing is most people are listening to you, Richard. Excellent. I'm very impressed.
So yeah, indeed, the answer is Mycoplasma synovia. You can get the other mycoplasma species in Turkey, so technically, there is no distinct wrong answer. However, mycoplasma synovia is by far the most common.
I just wanted to finish off this evening with talking a little bit about respiratory disease in waterfowl. Waterfowl are incredibly resilient and they exist in two states. They're either happy and running around or they're at death's door.
Waterfowl tend not to do the whole I'm a little bit ill thing. They're either happy or they're dying. And in reality, there's only one pathogen you need to be worried about, and that is pasturella.
My pasturella and waterfowl is actually called Ryan Morella, and that's a pestifer, and I'm not even going to attempt to spell that, let alone then try and pronounce it too often, but we'll stick with pasturella and for all intents and purposes. So it tends to cause septicaemia and sudden death in waterfowl. And once the infection becomes established, it's very difficult to treat, and you tend to find that it's transmitted via cuts in their feet.
So with the waterfowl running along with their webbed feet, they tend to get little cuts and abrasions on their, on their feet, particularly in the webbing, and any pastureel on the ground will then tend to get into these cuts and go on to cause septicemia rather than your classical respiratory signs. But the infection will get into the sinuses and into the lungs, and then subsequently you get your, your blood poisoning. Now traditionally, we were taught to treat these birds with penicillin, and it's relatively effective, but you want to give them at least a 5 day course, maybe even a 7 day course, to make sure that you really hammer it.
And once pasturella is established in a pond or in a range area, it's going to be there indefinitely, and I would strongly recommend vaccinating any new additions to the flock. Not for chickens, And turkeys, there is a licenced pasturella vaccine. For waterfowl, however, we need to look abroad to import a pasturella vaccine under an SIC.
So we want to use a specific waterfowl Ryanorella vaccine rather than the off the shelf pasturell Maltocia one we would use for chickens and turkeys. Again, the vaccine is killed, and we would jab the birds twice, 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster, and you can start to see that I'm using the same vaccine protocol for pretty much every respiratory pathogen, so it makes being a poultry vet relatively straightforward. And the vaccine is relatively effective in these cases.
I'm gonna pass you back to Bruce for our 5th full question. Right, folks, there we go. The question is up.
What is the biggest issue with treating respiratory diseases in Christmas turkeys? We're just waiting for a few stragglers. 5 more seconds and then we'll close the poll.
Right, there we go, Richard. Excellent. So most of you got the question right.
It's all of the above. So these are all big issues when treating respiratory disease in turkeys. The other thing that I just wanted to add in about treating Christmas turkeys is that sometimes if you're going to inject the birds, you can find that you get abscesses at the injection site.
So it might be important to warn owners that there is the possibility of an abscess, and certainly if people are going to sell these turkeys to the public at Christmas, the last thing you want when you're carving into your Christmas dinner is finding either an abscess or some sort of scar tissue there. So it's really important to think about that. It might be OK if it's only 1 or 2 birds in a large flock, and you can identify them birds so you can give them away to people you don't like or have them yourself for Christmas dinner, but you certainly don't want to go selling them.
So just keep that in mind that rather than jabbing turkeys for Christmas, you may wish to do it in water, even if there's concerns about the birds not drinking particularly well. So that's it from me this evening, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a bit of time for some questions and hopefully you've managed to think of some for myself and Bruce.
Richard, thank you. That was hugely informative and I, I probably shouldn't admit this on a recorded programme, but I have very limited chicken knowledge or bird knowledge at all actually. And I really found that hugely informative.
Thank you very much. You're very welcome. Question from myself.
You talk about putting medication in the water, and the problem with getting them to drink it. What about, putting it in water and actually dosing them if you have a limited number of birds like a crop dosing? You certainly can do that, Bruce, and I think it works very well for vets or vet nurses to do it.
But I think whenever it comes to owners doing it, if you're going to shringe it into the bird's mouth, there's a real risk of inhalation pneumonia. And if you're going to use a crop tube, you To be certain that the owner is pretty competent before doing it, so it can be done. But to be honest with you, I think it's so much easier to go and inject the bird into what is a relatively big breast muscle rather than fighting with the chicken, trying to gavage it or to shrie it into its mouth.
Right, right. Excellent. Well, I, Rich and I have to say that I think all of our participants tonight are are in a similar boat to me that they are stunned by all the fabulous information that you've given us and none of them have any questions for us tonight.
So it's just up to me to thank you for your time and thank everybody for attending. We really do appreciate it and I hope that you learned as much as I did on tonight's webinar. So thank you, Richard.
You're very welcome. And then ladies and gentlemen, I encourage you all to read the attached notes that came with this evening's webinar because there's a heck of a lot of information in there and I'm sure that some of you have been writing quite a lot of bits and pieces done this evening, but there's quite a bit of additional info in there for background reading. Yeah, what we'll do, Richard is I'm sure Dawn, my controller is still listening in the background.
We will ask her to email that out to the people that attended the webinar tonight just to make sure that they can get that. Perfect. Right, folks, that's it for us tonight.
So to Dawn in the background, thank you for all your help and Richard, thank you for sharing your information and for enlightening us all on what actually can be done for, for poultry. Good night, everyone. Thank you and good night.