Help!! Marek's Disease??

[warmheart]

Katrina, thank you for sharing your caring tribute of such a beautiful send-off for your cherished Piotr.

Seminolewind, you are a wonderfully caring, compassionate spirit, and your dear birds are so very fortunate to be in your care.

 

[polarbearpilot]

@JoePo - I welcome your opinion, and I am disappointed that people jump on you for posting your thoughts. I had a chicken with Marek's Disease. Before I know it was MD, it spread to another chicken. After trying for over two weeks to get them better, but to no avail, my husband had to cull them. I personally couldn't do it, but I am thankful that my husband was strong enough to do it for me. He didn't like it but still did it because it was necessary to stop the disease from spreading.

We had to clean out the cage, threw away all the things used/touched by the sick chickens. I'ts been a month, but we still block off the area where the sick chickens were kept just in case a few feathers remain somewhere. I read that the MD virus can live for up to 6 months, so we are going to let the sun kill the nasty virus for us.

 

[polarbearpilot]

This thread has a lot of information in it that could very well help someone later on. I would really hate to see this thread shut down because of negativity. Something I learned on another thread....when you see something like this posted, click on the person's name and you can see if this is their usual means of giving helpful information. If it is, don't answer or if you really must, PM that person with your thoughts and questions. I've seen way too many threads shut down because of nastiness and the good info contained in the thread lost.

JoePA is entitled to his views and welcome to post them. That's what BYC is all about. It is up to the rest of us to either ignore and move on, or agree and call it good. Just my 2 cents.

I agree.

 

[Haunted55]

@JoePo - I welcome your opinion, and I am disappointed that people jump on you for posting your thoughts. I had a chicken with Marek's Disease. Before I know it was MD, it spread to another chicken. After trying for over two weeks to get them better, but to no avail, my husband had to cull them. I personally couldn't do it, but I am thankful that my husband was strong enough to do it for me. He didn't like it but still did it because it was necessary to stop the disease from spreading.

We had to clean out the cage, threw away all the things used/touched by the sick chickens. I'ts been a month, but we still block off the area where the sick chickens were kept just in case a few feathers remain somewhere. I read that the MD virus can live for up to 6 months, so we are going to let the sun kill the nasty virus for us.

Actually....it can live a lot longer than that. If you can get some Oxine with the activator and spray everything with that. Then it's dead for sure.

 

[yelnad]

Can you please check out this video of my hen?

She's 11-12 wks old and started showing signs of this at maybe 4-5 weeks. She eats, drinks and gets along well. She is only slightly smaller than the others her age. At first we thought she dislocated her leg hopping up/down to the roost in the brooder. The rooster watches out for her.

Thank you.

 

[polarbearpilot]

I had two hens that died from Marek's Disease. Your hen didn't look anything like my two hens. I don't think it's MD.

 

[Nambroth]

Can you please check out this video of my hen?

She's 11-12 wks old and started showing signs of this at maybe 4-5 weeks. She eats, drinks and gets along well. She is only slightly smaller than the others her age. At first we thought she dislocated her leg hopping up/down to the roost in the brooder. The rooster watches out for her.

Thank you.

Poor girl. Can you gently feel the area from her hip down to see if she's sustained any type of injury on her "bum" leg? Trust me, I'd prefer that it be nearly anything but Marek's!
She's been like this for at least 5 weeks? Hmm. Often when birds present leg paralysis in association with Marek's, either they pass away shortly after, or seem to "get better". But there are no hard rules with Marek's, it seems.
Was this hen vaccinated against Marek's as a day-old?
Have you brought in any new (hatched) birds in the last year, or visited anyone else's birds, etc? Any other problems lately?

 

[yelnad]

We can check again for injury tonight or tomorrow, but we haven't felt anything weird in the past. This hen was not vaccinated, that I know of. She is one of the first 8 chicks we received from a local woman who hatched them. 2-3 weeks later we received 22 more from her, that were hatchery chickens and were vaccinated.

This is our first year with chickens.

I'll be emailing the woman today to see what she thinks and find out if anything is up with her flock.

 

[Nambroth]

We can check again for injury tonight or tomorrow, but we haven't felt anything weird in the past. This hen was not vaccinated, that I know of. She is one of the first 8 chicks we received from a local woman who hatched them. 2-3 weeks later we received 22 more from her, that were hatchery chickens and were vaccinated.

This is our first year with chickens.

I'll be emailing the woman today to see what she thinks and find out if anything is up with her flock.

You might ask if she's had any mysterious death or illness in her flock in the last year. It seems that sometimes people have chickens die and sometimes it's inconclusive which could be Marek's. Or not! It's hard to say. Her leg paralysis is suspicious but it seems strange that she'd have it for so long. Has it gotten better, worse?

 

[yelnad]

It's been really stable...maybe better but definitely not worse. We weren't even worried about her since she gets along so well, but then I was reading some other threads and I started to panic.

I emailed to inquire about the flock they came from.