Geese with respiratory problems!HELP!

[kris1990]

Hello,guys! We have some chicken with respiratory problems,we are giving them antibiotic. Today we noticed that 2 of our geese have mucus coming out their mouths and one of them is sneezing. They do not stay in the same enclosure as the sick chicken. We don't know how they got it. Is there anything we can do about it?

 

[Pyxis]

You probably tracked it from the chickens to the geese. Just because they don't come into contact doesn't mean it couldn't have traveled to them on your clothes, shoes, feeders, feed scoops, etc. You'll need to treat the geese too.

Just so you know this is likely caused by mycoplasma. If it is, all affected birds will be carriers for life and it will flare up whenever they are stressed, such as during a molt. They will also pass it to any new bird they come into contact with. You can never sell them to another person or you would be spreading the disease to their flock. Also, this disease can pass through the egg to the embryo inside, meaning hatch rates will go down and chicks and goslings that do hatch will likely hatch already infected with the disease. This means you can never sell your eggs to others for hatching, either, because you would be passing on the disease that way. You may want to cull one bird and send it off for necropsy so you know for sure what you're dealing with.

Sorry you are experiencing this. I went through it once myself and opted to cull my flock, as that is the only way to really get rid of it.

 

[kris1990]

Will their eggs be good for eating from human? That sounds like a really serious situation. How could've they got it? The ones that it started off were closed in a separate room (where we keep all the little ones till they grow up enough to be free range). The only contact with outside they had was when we go inside and we used to give them some grass from outside. And we did get chicks from 2 different place. Last time we got from a guy about 1h away from us. His were the first ones to show the symptoms. And I saw a rat trying to get in the enclosure yesterday.

 

[Pyxis]

It is unfortunately a pretty serious disease. The ones from the guy that showed symptoms first, did they start showing symptoms pretty soon after you brought them home? If so they were already carriers and had it already. Or they can also catch it from wild birds and rodents, like that rat that was trying to get in. The eggs are safe for human consumption, so you can still eat them.

 

[kris1990]

He told us to put them under quarantine from 10 days and then put them with our chicken. So for 10 days they were in the house and they were perfectly fine. After 10 days we put the bigger ones with our existing flock of smalle chicks and like a day or so later the new ones (from the guy) started showing symptoms.

 

[Pyxis]

Yep, they had it. Quarantine is best if you can do at least two weeks of it minimum. It's not that the new ones caught it from your flock either because the incubation period of the disease is 6 to 10 days. It sounds like it definitely came in on the new birds. It will flare up and they will show symptoms when stressed, and an introduction to a new flock is certainly stressful. Sorry that this has happened to you. For treatment, if you want to go that route, Denagard is great. It's a pig medicine, but the mycoplasma has no resistance to it, so it's really good for when they have a flare up. That's if you want to keep them all and not cull your flock and start over, which I know is a hard choice to make.

 

[kris1990]

Thank you! We'll try with this one. I hope it will work. We lost a lot of the little ones already and all the ones we lost were from the ones we bought from him. I hope the geese and we have ducks will be ok. I read somewhere that they don't do good on respiratory diseases