New Castle

Shared by Lamwa Vetcare
Not so long ago I shared with you the story of an accountant who started with a small flock of 200 birds and eventually increased this number to 60,000.

The story of this famer is quite inspiring considering that he quit his formal employment as an accountant to venture into poultry business. As you can possibly recall from the article that I shared on this platform is that this is a farmer who has taken poultry keeping professionally. As a result of this he has put in place all the necessary measures that a serious farmer ought to have such as; keeping farm records, having a means of weighing birds, having put in place bio-security measures and always seeking professional help. Most importantly, he has Lamwa Vetcare as the regular vets who happens to be yours truly.

Early this week he realized that his birds were dying. On Monday he collected three dead birds out of a flock of 8000 birds. He didn’t think that was something to worry about so he didn’t seek any professional help. On Tuesday he collected ten more dead birds and the mortality rate kept increasing and on Wednesday he found that eighty more had died. It is after Wednesday that it dawned on him that this was an alarming mortality rate and as such, he decided to contact me.

When the farmer explained to me how the rate at which the mortality rate was increasing I had to treat this matter as an emergency and so I dropped whatever I was doing to visit his farm. When I arrived at the firm I performed necropsy (post mortem) on the dead birds. I realized that the dead birds had succumbed to Newcastle disease.

It is good to remind you that Newcastle is a viral disease that has mortality of up to 100%. In other words, if your flock is infected with this disease then you could lose all your birds. This is therefore considered to be one of the most dangerous poultry diseases. At first the farmer looked surprised about how this disease could have spread to his poultry farm considering that he has put in place effective bio-security measures. For instance, he has a perimeter wall around his poultry farm and he also has foot dip to prevent the introduction of pathogens in the poultry houses. Moreover, he maintains a high level of hygiene.

After a considerable pause he recalled that some days prior to collecting the first three birds he had invited a butcher to come and weigh birds that were ready to be slaughtered. You see this farmer understands how to correctly administer Sangrovit Ws to his flock. So a sizeable number of his birds had already matured as they are in their 32 day. As you can recall from one of my posts Sangrovit WS not only boost the immunity of birds but also helps in improving feed conversion rate.

This means that after the 32 days his birds are normally mature having reached the market weight of 1.8kgs.
You see, when the butcher came to visit the farmer he was not around and so the butcher found the farmhand. Unfortunately, the butcher had come from another poultry farm that had been experiencing mortality rates. It appears that the butcher ignored to use the footdip and that is how he introduced the virus causing Newcastle disease to this farmers flock. Since the birds are already mature and ready for the market it would not be wise to use antibiotics to treat them as antibiotics require withdraw period. So in order to salvage this situation the farmer has doubled the dose of Sangrovit Ws in order to boost the immunity of his birds and by so doing help them not to succumb to this disease. The said farmer has maintained a very impressive attitude towards this whole situation and he even told me that poultry keeping business has its own fair challenges but one can overcome them by learning from his/her mistakes and always seeking professional help when needed.

kindly share widely and save a farmer from the Newcastle outbreak.
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Shared by Lamwa Vetcare

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