Diarrhea for 1 week

[jakethepainter]

Hi, I just got 3 one-year-old red sex-link chickens about 3 weeks ago from someone who could not keep them. Great layers, an egg each every single day. Then last Saturday (1 week ago) one chicken started looking droopy, got diarrhea. She had laid an egg in the morning, got sick in the afternoon. She has been like that for a week now. No eggs from her the last 7 days. No signs of trouble in the other two chickens. Sick chicken will be perky for a while, seems to be eating and drinking, but then she will kind of relapse and have more diarrhea. Some days the stool has been firmer, then some days watery again. She will go up into the coop (attached to run) and hang out in the nest box sometimes during the day. They eat regular chicken pellets, lettuce from my garden, some weeds and bugs from the garden that I throw in the run (but stopped this after she got sick), and some scratch I got from the previous owner. I have also given them a little yogurt this week.

I felt her crop and it has changed size - sometimes full, sometimes less. She looks really big overall, but might just be fluffed up.

Since I'm so new to chickens, I'm not sure whether this is serious or not or what to look for. Also, I don't really have a place to put her away from the other two chickens right now.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[CMV]

I would treat her for cocci. A new environment may mean a new variety of cocci in the soil. She may be suffering from an overload. If you use Corid you won't need to toss any eggs.

Good luck.

 

[jakethepainter]

Thanks. Is there any effective non-drug treatment? I live pretty far away from the nearest feed store... Or something I can do for a few days until I can get there?

Can you say more about the discarding eggs? Do you mean any of the chickens' eggs right now while she is not laying, or discarding them once she starts laying again? What is the concern? I have been wondering about that, especially since the sick chicken has been hanging out so much in the nest boxes.

 

[CMV]

If you treat cocci with Sulmet then you need to discard the eggs for several days. If you opt not to treat at all or with Corid her eggs should be fine.

 

[jakethepainter]

Thanks for the advice. I gave Corid in the water for all three chickens starting Monday afternoon, and by Friday morning the sick chicken was better and also laying again. Either time or Corid did the trick. I really appreciate your help.

Because I had trouble sorting out the Corid dosages on the forum, I thought I would post here the calculations I did. If anyone has specific dosage for chickens, rather than cattle (which is the only thing mentioned on the bottle), I'd be appreciative if they chimed in. I don't know anything about chickens yet, but I am good at math. I noticed that some of the threads had some arithmetic errors, which made it tricky to be sure of the results.

But assuming chickens are just tiny cows with feathers, here's the calculation:

For liquid Corid 9.6% solution in the water, not as a drench.
16 fl oz per 100gal water

.16 fl oz per 1 gal water
.96 teaspoons per 1 gal water (or, rounding, 1 teaspoon per 1 gal water)

On the bottle it says that an animal needs to take in 10mg of amprolium per 1kg (2.2 lb) of body weight and that there are 96mg of amprolium per 1 ml of liquid Corid.

Assuming my chicken weighs about 2 kg (4.4 lbs), it needs to get 20mg of amprolium, which it will get in 20/96 = .2 ml

Now, my water has 5 ml/1gal so how much water does the chicken need to drink to get .2 ml of Corid?
.2/5 = .04 gal or about .64 cups of the medicated water per day (5.14 fluid oz)

If your chicken weighs 3 kg (6.6 lbs), it would need to drink 1 cup of water per day to get 30 mg of amprolium at 1tsp per gallon of water.

Here's a link to a chart on the Corid website that gives teaspoons per gallon as well.
http://www.corid.com/watertankadmin_treatment.html