HOUSING SYSTEMS BIOSECURITY HOUSING & BROODING EARLY MANAGEMENT LIGHTING NUTRITION HEALTH HATCHING EGG MANAGEMENT 93 93 LOHMANN › MANAGEMENT GUIDE HEALTH Breeding birds can show their full genetic potential only if they are at good health. Diseases can impact your flock's performance, affecting egg production, shell quality, and mortality rates. A helpful tool to monitor the health of your flock is to keep track of performance and daily parameters. Before clinical signs appear, you may observe a reduced feed and water consumption or a different behaviour than normal. Such changes should encourage you and your local veterinarian to investigate deeper for any disease symptoms and perform further diagnostics. Biosecurity should always be the first strategy to avoid the introduction and spread of diseases. A comprehensive vaccination programme may help to prevent sickness. Antibiotics are only effective to reduce mortality and clinical signs caused by bacterial infections. VERTICAL TRANSMISSION VACCINATION Some pathogens can not only affect health and productivity of your flock, but can also be transmitted vertically, meaning from the parent stock to the progeny. Vertically transmitted pathogens, such as Mycoplasma spp., Salmonella spp. or avian leucosis virus, may interfere with embryo development and hatchability or compromise growth and later performance of commercial birds. A strict sanitary monitoring at selection and reproductive level is the basis to control these diseases in commercial layers. The strategy should always be to maintain parent stock free from these pathogens and regularly confirm it following a monitoring plan. In many cases antibiotic treatment cannot ensure a pathogen-free flock and thus cannot prevent reliably the vertical transmission of the pathogen to the progeny. For other diseases the only option to protect the progeny against sickness in their first days of life is the transmission of antibodies from parent stock via the yolk to the commercial day-old chicks (maternal derived antibodies = MDA). To ensure a sufficient development of these important antibodies the vaccination programme for Parent Stock needs to be adapted accordingly.
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