DIY fecal test question?

[LaurelRidgeDreams]

If you do fecal tests for your chickens, how many eggs per slide would be considered an infestation?

 

[Mahonri]

I have no idea. One? (Where there's one there's twenty?)

 

[cobrien]

I'm a former vet tech. We always considered even 1 egg to be a possible indication of infestation.

 

[cobrien]

PS I'm curious are you using your own microscope - if so how much did it cost?

 

[LaurelRidgeDreams]

Quote:
I bought a student microsope on Amazon for about $75. The name of it is My First Lab Microscope Model MFL-02. The reviews were good. This microscope works fine for parasite identification. I also bought a Veterinary Parasitology Reference Manual.

I'm making fecal solution from sugar. Got the formula from The Chicken Health Handbook. It's certainly an interesting poop activity.

 

[AinaWGSD]

Yep, even a single egg indicates the presence of parasites. Now whether you want to treat the parasites based on one egg and no physical symptoms or not is up to you. But any vet would recommend treatment.

Also something to note, the absence of parasite ova does not necessarily indicate the absence of parasites. Most intestinal parasites shed eggs intermittently, meaning that it is possible to have a negative fecal float but still have parasites. Another factor to consider is the fecal solution. A home-made sugar based fecal solution should be fine for your purposes, but is going to be less effective at floating eggs than most of the commercial fecal solutions. Even the solution we use at work is less effective than zinc centrifusion (theoretically, for the one month we did both to see if the outside lab was catching more positives than we were there wasn't really a significant difference in the number of parasites).