Not an Emergency...Marek's in the Flock

[Nambroth]

I talked to the vet at UT today. She said she if the birds were vaccinated as chicks, the breeder says they were, that is unlikely for both of them to have mereks. She said vaccines are not 100%, but two failing are unlikely. I'm taking them in tomorrow for an examination, the roo passed away today, the pullet is still alive. They're going to do a necropsy on him and they will probably euthanize her and do some testing. I'll post tomorrow after our visit. Thanks so much for the help and support. So far no signs or symptoms from the other 3 I ordered. She says no one in her flock is sick and my friend that ordered some says his aren't sick either.

I misunderstood! I thought you wanted to vaccinate your flock now that there was a Marek's scare.
There are a few explinations:
1. It's not Marek's,
2. It is Marek's and the chicks were improperly vaccinated OR did not build resistance (approximately 10% of chicks won't), or,
3. It is a mutated form of Marek's (they exist) which is particularly virulent and the chicks most susceptible to it succumbed.

It is very important to note-- according to what I was told by the vet / UoGA, vaccinated birds are harder to test for Marek's and might give a false negative depending on what kind of test is run. It might be worth asking to see if their poultry expert(s) agree with what I was told.

For those of you who have given the super B to your mareks birds do they ever get better? Or is it just extending their misery?

One more: my lavender with wrys neck has lice I think(small yellowish bugs) I've been dusting her with DE is there anything else I should try? None of my other birds have the lice like her I think it's because she is unable to preen her self

Thanks

Is the DE working, can you tell? You will get all sorts of responses as to the effectiveness of DE on an active infestation. It is my personal thought that it is best as a preventative. I say this as a person that is loathe to use toxins and pesticides, but-- once there is an infestation on a bird, it is probably worthwhile to use poultry dust or your lice killer of choice, as they can weaken a bird very rapidly.
Here are two photos of poultry lice.

 

[Haunted55]

Eastern Equine Encephalitis has most of the same symptoms, that's a virus. Botulism has paralysis, but the affected chickens die within a day or two. So I'm not sure. Heck, if Duramycin worked, put them all on it. Won't hurt to try.

I agree with this to a point Seminolewind...with the dose they gave them before, there very well may be liver damage. If it were me, I would want to try something different and I am the first one to say Duramycin-10! At this point I would recommend a dosage of either Sulmet or Di-Methox, 1/2 tsp per gallon of water for 3-5 days. this is a stronge dosing but it will affect the body a bit different than putting them back on the tetracycline. The Sulmet dosage is 2 tbls. per gallon. Either of these will need to be followed with a good probiotic.

Also, please excuse the typos...I am now typing 1 paragraph ahead of it showing up. I do try to fix them but i probably miss quite a few.

 

[seminolewind]

Quote:
Yea, the dose was high.

 

[seminolewind]

For those of you who have given the super B to your mareks birds do they ever get better? Or is it just extending their misery?
My sick lavender with wrys neck and the eye that wont open that the vet told us had mareks hasn't changed condition wise no worse no better. We are giving her 1/2 super b & vitamin e by syringe 2 times per day. She also has a super b in her water(1gal waterer) along with a vitamin e floating in there. I don't believe she is drinking her water unless we dip her beak in it .
My other lavender who is sick just sits around she will get up and move around but not much. I have seen her eating. We stopped syringe feeding her after 2 times cause she's hard to catch and runs so we just put the super b in the water.
None of the girls have any nasal discharge or watery eyes
Someone here said something about adding a turkey to the flock does that actually work? I have a friend that has turkeys would it be worth a try or would I just be introducing new bugs for my already sick girls to get.
One more: my lavender with wrys neck has lice I think(small yellowish bugs) I've been dusting her with DE is there anything else I should try? None of my other birds have the lice like her I think it's because she is unable to preen her self

Thanks

DE is more of a preventative rather than a pesticide. Get some Sevin or Poultry Dust.

 

[seminolewind]

Sounds like my situation. I lost 6 of 9 vaccinated as chicks. I did have a necropsy done. The results were consistent with Marek's. I really wish they had not been vaccinated. As it is, I may be dealing with a vaccine resistant strain, with new chicks coming in a couple if weeks. (Meyer's this time. Last was a local breeder/small hatchery.)

So sorry! I know one of the hatcheries uses a 3 strain vaccine. Maybe someone here knows which one.

 

[seminolewind]

I talked to the vet at UT today. She said she if the birds were vaccinated as chicks, the breeder says they were, that is unlikely for both of them to have mereks. She said vaccines are not 100%, but two failing are unlikely. I'm taking them in tomorrow for an examination, the roo passed away today, the pullet is still alive. They're going to do a necropsy on him and they will probably euthanize her and do some testing. I'll post tomorrow after our visit. Thanks so much for the help and support. So far no signs or symptoms from the other 3 I ordered. She says no one in her flock is sick and my friend that ordered some says his aren't sick either.

I do pray it's something else. I have acquaintences (sp) that put together over 1k dollars to get a group of chicks, not only did they lose them, but they lost a lot of their own chickens. And a year before that (few years ago), I had a thread with someone who lost hundreds of dollars on rare chicks she bought , and many of her own rare birds. She was devastated, and she and I more or less cried on eachother's shoulder . In fact she had a Marek's survivor rooster , a Tolbunt Polish, that she mailed to me, and has been here almost 2 years. We figured, they all had Marek's, why not. She couldn't sell him . Her chickens were confirmed Marek's by necropsy.

So, I'm really not impressed when people tell me they're vaccinated. I ordered 6 chicks from one of the big hatcheries, vaccinated, and they are all over 1.5 years old.

Nambroth, you said something a little light bulb went on. It does seem that when one is symptomatic, it frequently sets off a chain reaction. They must pass more virus when they are symptomatic.

Please be sure to share your findings. It helps to learn more.

 

[Nambroth]

Meyer Hatchery uses only the HVT vaccine, FC-126 to be exact. Ugh. I still have seven chicks shipping on the 15th of October. I have two surviving pullets that seem healthy and one roo that is doing ok other than not as active as he should be.

Ugh-- really? When I called them in winter of this year I asked which vaccine they used and was told all three -- I wanted to know, because my 2011 chicks were from Meyer, and my roo from another source was confirmed with Marek's. I was trying to make an educated understanding if my birds had better protection or not. Maybe the person I talked to didn't actually know. I don't remember her name.

 

[Nambroth]

Nambroth, you said something a little light bulb went on. It does seem that when one is symptomatic, it frequently sets off a chain reaction. They must pass more virus when they are symptomatic.

Please be sure to share your findings. It helps to learn more.

Yes, this is one of the things all herpesvirus is good at.

Marek;s is a herpesvirus and when we combat Marek's it really good to know a bit about herpesvirus in general and its lifecycle.

This is sort of the stupid/fast description. I am not an expert nor trained in this field! The biology of it is more complex but this will suffice:

Herpes is a DNA virus, and as such when it infects a cell, it uses the cell's nucleus to replicate itself. It's pretty nasty, actually.. the virus injects its own acids into the cell's, and the cell mistakenly replicates the viral acids instead of its own. Then the virus can "take over" the cell's nucleus to combine its own DNA with the cell's normal DNA. Essentially like a computer virus writing over the data on your hard drive, if you will. It then copies itself, using the cell's power to copy itself, only the result is more virus. In a non-symptomatic infection, this is all it really does, because at this point the cell's infection is usually detected by the immune system, which will then fight the infection. At this point a bird either becomes resistant to the disease (immune) or it will lose the battle and become symptomatic. If the virus "loses", It can create a latent gene in an RNA strand, pretty much sitting in dormancy within the host animal. Occasionally this viral material will leave the cell, and become "shed" by the host, but it is generally understood that in this case the host can be contagious but generally is not highly contagious. This is what we experience with "carrier" birds that show no symptoms.

These latent packets of virus DNA/RNA can rest in the host, and later become active when the immune system is compromised. It may be able to overtake the host at this time. An example of a human herpesvirus that does this is chicken pox, which can then reoccur as symptomatic shingles much later in the person's life (usually when the person is under stress or has a reduced immune system for some reason). This is what happens in our Marek's flocks when a chicken seems fine for a long time, but then suddenly becomes symptomatic with, say, ocular Marek's. Latent cells-- these are the cells that hold the viral build blocks but are not active-- can remain dormant but able to become active for the host's entire life.

The virus can then use the cell to manufacture a LOT of virus from a single cell. When the cell contains too many copies of the virus to contain within the cell walls, the cell will split and release the many viral copies. This results in cell death. In a productive, or Lytic infection of herpesvirus, the virus is able to replicate enough of itself that the immune system cannot suppress it, and the host becomes symptomatic. At this time, the host can "shed" copies of the virus in great quantity, because the virus is able to replicate itself within the host's cells in vast amounts.

This is also why, by the time a bird is symptomatic, one must assume that it has shed enough virus into its environment that the entire shared flock will carry it. Isolation of the symptomatic bird at this point is ideal, and can help reduce the amount of virus in its environment, but it has already spread the virus.

 

[Nambroth]

Eastern Equine Encephalitis has most of the same symptoms, that's a virus. Botulism has paralysis, but the affected chickens die within a day or two. So I'm not sure. Heck, if Duramycin worked, put them all on it. Won't hurt to try.

I just re-read this and remembered something. I have read that the NorthEast has had a large outbreak of Equine Encephalitis this year (carried by mosquitoes). Along with West Nile Virus, but that does not become symptomatic in chickens. EEE, I thought, is not known to become symptomatic in chickens, though? I thought that chickens were only used as sentinel species when it comes to these two viruses. http://www.merckmanuals.com/vet/pou...rview_of_viral_encephalitides_in_poultry.html

Is this incorrect? I'm trying to learn.

 

[BigECarter]

https://www.meyerhatchery.com/produ...Supplies&grd_prodone_filter=PRODUCT_ID = 'MRK'

And I called and confirmed.