Control measures for H5N1 avian influenza involve increased biosecurity, monitoring, surveillance and vaccination. Subclinical infection in farmed ducks is important for virus persistence. In major duck rearing countries, homologous H5N1 vaccines are being used in ducks, so sero-surveillance using H5- or N1-specific antibody testing cannot identify infected flocks. An alternative is to include ...

Current commercial H9 avian influenza vaccines cannot provide satisfactory protective immunity against antigenic variant influenza viruses in ducks. Poly I:C, when used as an adjuvant, improves humoral and cellular immunity in many animals but has not been tested in ducks. In this study, we investigated the protective efficacy of Poly I:C as an adjuvant for an inactivated H9N2 Avian influenza v...

The aim of this study was to evaluate effects of microbial aerosols on immune function of ducks and shed light on the establishment of microbial aerosol concentration standards for poultry. A total of 1800 1-d-old cherry valley ducks were randomly divided into five groups (A, B, C, D, and E) with 360 ducks in each. (...) Concentrations of airborne bacteria, fungi, endotoxin in different groups ...

Little is known about baseline concentrations of adrenal hormones and hormonal responses to stress in sea ducks, although significant population declines documented in several species suggest that sea ducks are exposed to increased levels of environmental stress. Such declines have been observed in geographically distinct harlequin duck populations. We performed an adrenocorticotropic hormone (...

0749-596X/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.jml.2010.12.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of P Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. E-mail address: [email protected] (S.-J. Lesli Generics are statements such as ‘‘tigers are striped’’ and ‘‘ducks lay eggs’’. They express general, though not universal or exceptionless, claims about kinds (Carlson & P...

Pasteurella multocida is an important pathogen of numerous domestic poultry and wild animals and is associated with a variety of diseases including fowl cholera. The aim of this study was to develop an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) based on recombinant outer-membrane protein H (rOmpH) for detection of anti-P. multocida antibodies in serum to determine their prevalence in Ch...

Fishborne zoonotic trematodes (FZT) are widespread in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. It is now recognized that the risk of being infected from eating raw fish dishes applies not only to humans, but also to domestic animals (e.g., cats, dogs, and pigs) and fish-eating birds. The role of ducks and chicken, commonly raised on fish farms, as reservoir hosts, however, has not been adequately investigat...

DNA vaccine is a promising strategy for protection against virus infection. However, little is known on the efficacy of vaccination with two plasmids for expressing the glycoprotein D (gD) and glycoprotein B (gB) of duck enteritis virus (DEV) in inducing immune response and immunoprotection against virulent virus infection in Pekin ducks. In this study, two eukaryotic expressing plasmids of pcD...

Two experiments were conducted to study the effects of stocking density on growth performance, carcass yield, and foot pad lesions of White Pekin ducks from hatch to 14 d of age (experiment 1) and from 14 to 42 d of age (experiment 2), respectively. All ducks were reared in raised plastic wire-floor pens with a pen size of 30 m(2), and males and females were mixed at a ratio of 1:1 in each pen ...

Pekin ducks are often bill-trimmed to prevent feather pecking and cannibalism, but this practice has been criticized because of the resulting potential for acute and chronic pain. The goal of this experiment was to compare 2 different bill-trimming methods, hot blade trimming with cautery (TRIM) and cautery only (tip-searing; SEAR), on the behavior, bill morphology, and weight gain of Pekin duc...