- Sep 12, 2012
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This is something I'd love to see added to the "Medical Treatments Recommended by BYCers" in the sticky thread of Helpful References and Links at the top.
I just had incredible success with this, and wanted to share it. All of the names above are pretty much the same thing. Duramycin is the brand it is sold under at Tractor Supply and a 250 mL bottle is only $23. For most of us raising chickens who watch budgets, that's actually a VERY cheap price for a medication for the amount you get (roughly a pint).
I used to buy Duramycin for rabbits in the powder form, but it makes the water bitter so they won't touch it. Powder form is recommended for chickens, turkeys, and ducks, but only if it can be mixed with water and used as the ONLY source of drinking water during the time of treatment. The problem is, free-range chickens can find all sorts of odd places to get fresh water from, especially right after it rains. So when using the powder form, you never REALLY know if the chickens have ingested enough.
But I had a chicken with an eye injury that had become infected, and needed some way to treat it. Since I still have an almost-full bottle of this stuff, and PLENTY of my mom's diabetic syringes laying around with 29-gauge needles, I decided to give it a try. I looked it up on the internet to find out exactly how/where chickens get injections. But Duramycin also burned my rabbits when I injected it into a muscle, so I chose to skip that and go subcutaneous (under the skin) around the neck. I also chose this because I wanted the antibiotic to be given as close to the actual infection as possible, and most other animals receive injections under the skin near the neck as well.
The dosage was a bigger problem. The powder form has instructions for birds, but the injection form only has instructions for cows and pigs. But the dosage is the same, and based on body weight, so I went with that. Rounding is usually okay with smaller dosages. That being said, using a diabetic syringe, my full-size (NOT bantam) Ameraucana hen took about 40 units. If you were measuring with a normal syringe, you could probably bump it up to about 1/2cc safely.
Now keep in mind that a mL and a cc are the same. So a bottle of 250mL of antibiotic is going to give you about 500 doses! So that $23 is fairly cheap now.
And it's considered a broad-spectrum antibiotic, meaning it targets MANY different low-grade bacterial infections. It is sulfur-based (thus why it burns and tastes bitter), so it's yellow and it can stain, but you should have no problem with that when using the injection form, since it never even gets exposed to air.
And now that I've explained how to use it and how much... I have to say it worked GREAT. For the first time in about a week (during which I cleaned her eye EVERY DAY with saline solution), she was able to see out of her eye first thing in the morning. Usually it was crusted over with so much discharge, it had literally glued her eye shut. And this evening when I walked back out and checked on her again, the skin around the eye was no longer pale and white, but rather dark red like the healthy eye is. This definitely puts my mind at ease, since a free-range chicken without eyesight in one eye, is just ASKING for something to attack it!
I just had incredible success with this, and wanted to share it. All of the names above are pretty much the same thing. Duramycin is the brand it is sold under at Tractor Supply and a 250 mL bottle is only $23. For most of us raising chickens who watch budgets, that's actually a VERY cheap price for a medication for the amount you get (roughly a pint).
I used to buy Duramycin for rabbits in the powder form, but it makes the water bitter so they won't touch it. Powder form is recommended for chickens, turkeys, and ducks, but only if it can be mixed with water and used as the ONLY source of drinking water during the time of treatment. The problem is, free-range chickens can find all sorts of odd places to get fresh water from, especially right after it rains. So when using the powder form, you never REALLY know if the chickens have ingested enough.
But I had a chicken with an eye injury that had become infected, and needed some way to treat it. Since I still have an almost-full bottle of this stuff, and PLENTY of my mom's diabetic syringes laying around with 29-gauge needles, I decided to give it a try. I looked it up on the internet to find out exactly how/where chickens get injections. But Duramycin also burned my rabbits when I injected it into a muscle, so I chose to skip that and go subcutaneous (under the skin) around the neck. I also chose this because I wanted the antibiotic to be given as close to the actual infection as possible, and most other animals receive injections under the skin near the neck as well.
The dosage was a bigger problem. The powder form has instructions for birds, but the injection form only has instructions for cows and pigs. But the dosage is the same, and based on body weight, so I went with that. Rounding is usually okay with smaller dosages. That being said, using a diabetic syringe, my full-size (NOT bantam) Ameraucana hen took about 40 units. If you were measuring with a normal syringe, you could probably bump it up to about 1/2cc safely.
Now keep in mind that a mL and a cc are the same. So a bottle of 250mL of antibiotic is going to give you about 500 doses! So that $23 is fairly cheap now.
And it's considered a broad-spectrum antibiotic, meaning it targets MANY different low-grade bacterial infections. It is sulfur-based (thus why it burns and tastes bitter), so it's yellow and it can stain, but you should have no problem with that when using the injection form, since it never even gets exposed to air.
And now that I've explained how to use it and how much... I have to say it worked GREAT. For the first time in about a week (during which I cleaned her eye EVERY DAY with saline solution), she was able to see out of her eye first thing in the morning. Usually it was crusted over with so much discharge, it had literally glued her eye shut. And this evening when I walked back out and checked on her again, the skin around the eye was no longer pale and white, but rather dark red like the healthy eye is. This definitely puts my mind at ease, since a free-range chicken without eyesight in one eye, is just ASKING for something to attack it!
