Poultry vaccines are widely applied to prevent and control contagious poultry diseases. Their use in poultry production is aimed at avoiding or minimising the emergence of clinical disease at farm level, thus increasing production. Vaccines and vaccination programmes vary broadly in regard to several local factors (e.g. type of production, local pattern of disease, costs and potential losses) a...

Poultry production in South Africa, a so-called developing country, may be seen as a gradient between two extremes with highly integrated commercial enterprises with world-class facilities on one hand and unimproved rural chickens kept by households and subsistence farmers on the other. Although vaccination against Newcastle disease is widely applied to control this devastating infection, epizo...

Coccidiosis in poultry is still considered as one of the main diseases affecting performance of poultry reared under intensive production systems. Although a lot of research efforts have been allocated towards molecular techniques, and a lot of progress has been noted in this field, practical use of these techniques are not available today, except in the field of diagnostics, where several poly...

The Clostridium-related poultry disease, necrotic enteritis (NE), causes substantial economic losses on a global scale. In the present study, a mixture of two plant-derived phytonutrients, Capsicum oleoresin and turmeric oleoresin (XT), was evaluated for its effects on local and systemic immune responses using a co-infection model of experimental NE in commercial broilers. Chickens were fed fro...

Foodborne diseases caused by enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter species are of public health and economic significance. Shedding of these pathogens during production and slaughter are risks for contamination of products for human consumption. Consequently, strategies are sought to prevent or reduce the carriage of these pathogens in food animals before slaughter. ...

The presence of mycotoxins in poultry feeds is a significant factor for financial losses to animal industries. Ingestion of mycotoxin-contaminated feed by chickens causes injury to the gastrointestinal tract. DON has negative effects on the active transport of some nutrients in the small intestine of chickens. We tested the hypothesis that prefeeding with probiotic (Eubacterium sp.) or inulin, ...

Emergence and transmission of infectious diseases have an enormous impact on the poultry industry and present a serious threat to the health of humans and wild birds. Noncommercial poultry operations, such as backyard poultry facilities in China, are potential sources of virus exchange between commercial poultry and wild birds. It is particularly critical in wetland areas where backyard poultry...

A needs assessment survey was developed to assess the knowledge and attitudes of poultry vendors at farmers' markets in Pennsylvania, on food safety, regulation, and poultry production. Vendors were administered a 32-question paper survey, in person, during market hours. The results revealed critical vendor practices and identified important vendor knowledge gaps and attitudes on food safety an...

Salmonella and Listeria spp. are frequently detected in poultry meats. Conventional isolation and identification methods to detect these microrganisms in food are laborious and time-consuming. In the present study the occurrence of Salmonellae and Listeriae on 362 samples of retail poultry in Caserta, South Italy was evaluated and standard microbiological and rapid methods were compared. Furthe...

Why is Poultry Welfare in develoPing countries a concern? The poultry sector is one of the most rapidly growing livestock sectors worldwide: between 1961 and 2001 the number of poultry slaughtered annually increased by 621 percent. Although industrialized countries have much higher average per capita consumption of most poultry products, production in developing countries is increasing rapidly....