POULTRY DISEASES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 3

POULTRY DISEASES

FAULTY FEEDING BLAMED. Faulty feeding is blamed for a big percentage of the diseases which poultry suffers from, but nevertheless nutrition is not the causative factor in disease. Answering a question, “Why shouldn’t poultry mortality be high?” Dr Monty A. Jull, writing in the ‘New England Poultryman,’ gives 12 causes of disease other than from nutritional causes, which incidentally provide valuable hints to poultrykeepers:— 1. In thousands of cases growing chicks and laying hens are kept on the same land year after year, the soil all the time becoming more thoroughly contaminated With the “eggs” of numerous parasites and the organisms of various diseases. 2. Thousands upon thousands of brooder and laying houses are never properly cleaned nor thoroughly disinfected. 3. In all too many cases unhealthy conditions, including overcrowding, that tend to lower the vitality of the stock, prevail in brooder and laying houses because of poor housing conditions or because of mismanagement, or both. 4. On all too many farms the old stock is allowed to mix with the growing chicks. 6. Immature and undersized birds are used all too numerously for breeding purposes. 7. The use of diseased birds as breeders tends to disseminate disease, and inasmuch as more birds become infected each year the dissemination of disease increases each succeeding year. 8. Commercial incubation is frequently a means ol spreading disease. 9. The’ dissemination of diseases is augmented by the widespread distribution of baby chicks, market poultry, and breeding stock. 10. In many cases where breeding stock is purchased it is not adequately quarantined before being introduced into the flock.

11. Oftentimes birds shipped from egg-Jaying contests and poultry shows harbour disease organisms of various kinds.

12. Visitors may carry disease organisms from farm to farm, and the flock owner himself may carry them Irom pen to pen.