BACKGROUND Flock surveillance systems for avian influenza (AI) virus play a critical role in countries where vaccination is not practiced so as to establish the epidemiological characteristics of AI needed for the development of prevention and control strategies in such countries. MATERIALS AND METHODS As part of routine AI monitoring in southwest Nigeria, a competitive ELISA was used for det...

Collecting sera from new-born chicks requires their sacrifice, which is an invasive and little economic method of sampling. We studied the possibility of replacing the antibody titres in serum of chicks by those in pre-incubated egg yolk for determining the optimal Age of Vaccination (OAV) against Infectious Bursal Disease (IBD) by the Deventer formula. The study focused on 10 hyper-immunized b...

A 5-yr retrospective study (November 2006-December 2011) was conducted to determine the isolation frequency of Pasteurella multocida and Gallibacterium anatis and their antibiograms from chickens submitted to the Mississippi Poultry Research and Diagnostic Laboratory. The number of isolations of G. anatis increased over the last 5 yr in broiler and broiler breeder type chickens. For P. multocid...

  Egg drop syndrome (EDS) is caused by a hemagglutinating adenovirus which has become a major cause of lost egg production and sever economic losses in breeder and layer chicken flocks throughout the world. A PCR assay was optimized for detection of EDS virus in inoculated allantoic fluids (AFs) of duck and chicken emberyonated eggs. Two strains of EDS viruses were propagated in allantoic cavit...

A free-range broiler breeder flock was studied in order to determine the natural patterns of Campylobacter colonization over a period of 63 weeks. Campylobacter sequence types (STs) were not mutually exclusive and on average colonized only 17.7% of the birds tested at any time. Campylobacter STs typically reached a peak in prevalence upon initial detection in the flock before tailing off, altho...

A new subgroup of avian leukosis virus (ALV) that includes a unique env gene, designated J, was identified recently in England. Sequence analysis of prototype English isolate HPRS-103 revealed several other unique genetic characteristics of this strain and provided information that it arose by recombination between exogenous and endogenous virus sequences. In the past several years, ALV J type ...

Good rearing management is the starting point for healthy, productive and profitable hatching egg production. Rearing management means all factors which influence the birds’ health and includes several factors such as house structure, climatic conditions (ventilation, temperature, litter condition), stocking density, feed and water supply, hygienic conditions as well as the qualification and kn...