Moving Forward- Breeding for Resistance to Marek's Disease

[microchick]

@jenniferlamar70, looks like I'm following you these days, two desperate souls trying to cope with what we have going on in our flocks in a futile attempt to make sense of it all.

I've been posting over on the Marek's in my Flock thread but I'll try to give a capsule summary of what is going on with my flock. Since June of last year I have suffered the loss of 7 chickens all to mysterious causes. Some definitely neurological with seizures and weird behavior, some to wasting, others to sudden death cardiac with the bird flipped on it's back where it was standing and dying without warning. All the deaths are in birds from the youngest being 1 week to the oldest being 25 months.

Several weeks ago I noticed that a 9 month old hen, who I had noticed was exhibiting a 'weird' pupil had developed gray eye. I have two other chickens with weird pupils but innocently believed that it was a genetic thing as the hen who had set the eggs that hatched the other two birds had a weird pupil that I believe occurred via an injury. When I saw the gray eye, I knew.

Two nights ago my husband, who is a retired eye doctor used his portable slit lamp and 'looked' inside the affected bird's eyes. He confirmed that it was indeed an infection/damage caused by a herpes infection.

No denying it. I have Marek's in my flock.

Last Sunday I lost my senior rooster at 24/25 months of age. He was a Welsummer and to that point in time all the symptoms had occurred in my Buff Orps. Chester was the first Welly and I had held out hopes that he would survive so I could use him to breed for resistance. He went to roost fine and the next morning I found him gasping for breath and purple with cyanosis. No other symptoms. It' was Marek's, I'm sure. I put him down that morning.

I have besides the BOs and Welly's a flock of 23 OEGBs ranging from 8 months to 6 weeks. Yesterday a 6 week old began sowing signs of paralysis in her left leg. This morning she is walking, eating, etc but she is 'knuckling' under with her toes when she walks and other than using the leg like a crutch, it is otherwise useless to her. I'm not expecting a positive outcome from her symptoms, which hit suddenly.

My question for everyone is this. Right now I have no roosters that are old enough to be considered 'resistant' to Marek's. In fact I have three that are loosing weight and one of them is showing a weird pupil and 4 others birds, all hens that are either showing ocular symptoms or loosing weight.

How old do you consider that a rooster has to be before you contemplate using him in breeding for resistance? I have one rooster who looks healthy at this time who is is just over a year old and another who is 8 months old. I have 5 roosters remaining. Three are either showing ocular or weight loss symptoms. I also have two OEGB cockerels who are 8 months old and a bunch of fledglings that are from 6 to 9 weeks old. The 9 week olds were incubated on site and the 6 week olds (one of which is showing signs of paralysis) were broody raised. I do have a nice group of hens, 8 months to 25 months of age who are also asymptomatic.

I also have a BO hen on 5 bantam eggs right now due to hatch in 11 days.

My flock right now is total 46 birds, 7 showing signs of Marek's a this point.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[alibabba]

Getting the hang of the new site...

Lucky for me I am cross breeding for my own little flock of feathered leg yard decor, chicken TV, that lays a blue egg.

I got a roo that was over a year old. I know unvac. Because John Blehm does not vaccinate.
The polish Roos I got from Jersey, surely not vac. but I sold them. They were mainly for protection.

Anywho, if my Roos and pullets make it a few weeks after crow and egg laying they are golden...

If anyone wants a cross Mareks hardy roo. My Gosh, let me know... I hate taking them to the sale!

 

[alibabba]

@jenniferlamar70, looks like I'm following you these days, two desperate souls trying to cope with what we have going on in our flocks in a futile attempt to make sense of it all.

I've been posting over on the Marek's in my Flock thread but I'll try to give a capsule summary of what is going on with my flock. Since June of last year I have suffered the loss of 7 chickens all to mysterious causes. Some definitely neurological with seizures and weird behavior, some to wasting, others to sudden death cardiac with the bird flipped on it's back where it was standing and dying without warning. All the deaths are in birds from the youngest being 1 week to the oldest being 25 months.

Several weeks ago I noticed that a 9 month old hen, who I had noticed was exhibiting a 'weird' pupil had developed gray eye. I have two other chickens with weird pupils but innocently believed that it was a genetic thing as the hen who had set the eggs that hatched the other two birds had a weird pupil that I believe occurred via an injury. When I saw the gray eye, I knew.

Two nights ago my husband, who is a retired eye doctor used his portable slit lamp and 'looked' inside the affected bird's eyes. He confirmed that it was indeed an infection/damage caused by a herpes infection.

No denying it. I have Marek's in my flock.

Last Sunday I lost my senior rooster at 24/25 months of age. He was a Welsummer and to that point in time all the symptoms had occurred in my Buff Orps. Chester was the first Welly and I had held out hopes that he would survive so I could use him to breed for resistance. He went to roost fine and the next morning I found him gasping for breath and purple with cyanosis. No other symptoms. It' was Marek's, I'm sure. I put him down that morning.

I have besides the BOs and Welly's a flock of 23 OEGBs ranging from 8 months to 6 weeks. Yesterday a 6 week old began sowing signs of paralysis in her left leg. This morning she is walking, eating, etc but she is 'knuckling' under with her toes when she walks and other than using the leg like a crutch, it is otherwise useless to her. I'm not expecting a positive outcome from her symptoms, which hit suddenly.

My question for everyone is this. Right now I have no roosters that are old enough to be considered 'resistant' to Marek's. In fact I have three that are loosing weight and one of them is showing a weird pupil and 4 others birds, all hens that are either showing ocular symptoms or loosing weight.

How old do you consider that a rooster has to be before you contemplate using him in breeding for resistance? I have one rooster who looks healthy at this time who is is just over a year old and another who is 8 months old. I have 5 roosters remaining. Three are either showing ocular or weight loss symptoms. I also have two OEGB cockerels who are 8 months old and a bunch of fledglings that are from 6 to 9 weeks old. The 9 week olds were incubated on site and the 6 week olds (one of which is showing signs of paralysis) were broody raised. I do have a nice group of hens, 8 months to 25 months of age who are also asymptomatic.

I also have a BO hen on 5 bantam eggs right now due to hatch in 11 days.

My flock right now is total 46 birds, 7 showing signs of Marek's a this point.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

@jenniferlamar70, looks like I'm following you these days, two desperate souls trying to cope with what we have going on in our flocks in a futile attempt to make sense of it all.

I've been posting over on the Marek's in my Flock thread but I'll try to give a capsule summary of what is going on with my flock. Since June of last year I have suffered the loss of 7 chickens all to mysterious causes. Some definitely neurological with seizures and weird behavior, some to wasting, others to sudden death cardiac with the bird flipped on it's back where it was standing and dying without warning. All the deaths are in birds from the youngest being 1 week to the oldest being 25 months.

Several weeks ago I noticed that a 9 month old hen, who I had noticed was exhibiting a 'weird' pupil had developed gray eye. I have two other chickens with weird pupils but innocently believed that it was a genetic thing as the hen who had set the eggs that hatched the other two birds had a weird pupil that I believe occurred via an injury. When I saw the gray eye, I knew.

Two nights ago my husband, who is a retired eye doctor used his portable slit lamp and 'looked' inside the affected bird's eyes. He confirmed that it was indeed an infection/damage caused by a herpes infection.

No denying it. I have Marek's in my flock.

Last Sunday I lost my senior rooster at 24/25 months of age. He was a Welsummer and to that point in time all the symptoms had occurred in my Buff Orps. Chester was the first Welly and I had held out hopes that he would survive so I could use him to breed for resistance. He went to roost fine and the next morning I found him gasping for breath and purple with cyanosis. No other symptoms. It' was Marek's, I'm sure. I put him down that morning.

I have besides the BOs and Welly's a flock of 23 OEGBs ranging from 8 months to 6 weeks. Yesterday a 6 week old began sowing signs of paralysis in her left leg. This morning she is walking, eating, etc but she is 'knuckling' under with her toes when she walks and other than using the leg like a crutch, it is otherwise useless to her. I'm not expecting a positive outcome from her symptoms, which hit suddenly.

My question for everyone is this. Right now I have no roosters that are old enough to be considered 'resistant' to Marek's. In fact I have three that are loosing weight and one of them is showing a weird pupil and 4 others birds, all hens that are either showing ocular symptoms or loosing weight.

How old do you consider that a rooster has to be before you contemplate using him in breeding for resistance? I have one rooster who looks healthy at this time who is is just over a year old and another who is 8 months old. I have 5 roosters remaining. Three are either showing ocular or weight loss symptoms. I also have two OEGB cockerels who are 8 months old and a bunch of fledglings that are from 6 to 9 weeks old. The 9 week olds were incubated on site and the 6 week olds (one of which is showing signs of paralysis) were broody raised. I do have a nice group of hens, 8 months to 25 months of age who are also asymptomatic.

I also have a BO hen on 5 bantam eggs right now due to hatch in 11 days.

My flock right now is total 46 birds, 7 showing signs of Marek's a this point.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Has been said, broody raised seems better. I let my broodies raise in an area not frequented by the flock. Then let them free range together around 4 to Six weeks. Gradual exposure?
BOL!

 

[microchick]

My big frustration at the moment is getting a rooster to last longer than two years of age. Yesterday I found the little rooster that appears in my avatar, dead. He was fine the day before. Crowing, eating, acting like a rooster chasing down any hen that is slower than he is. Yesterday afternoon I found him dead in the coop. No signs of Marek's disease. In fact, no sign of anything so his death will remain a mystery.

At the moment, I have 26 bantams, none showing signs of Marek's although I have lost one at least to the disease, and 22 standard BO and Welsummers, 5 of them showing open signs of Marek's, grey eyes, weight loss, cyanosis, etc. Two with grey eye are hens, the rest are roosters. At the moment, I have no surviving roosters that are older than 16 months old. Only two of that age aren't showing at least one symptom of Marek's. The rest are either too young or as in the case of the standard sized birds, showing signs of Marek's.

I do have hens that will be three years old next Feb that are symptom free at the moment. But no surviving roosters that have proven to be resistant.

I tried separating the roosters and hens, putting only two breeding age roosters in with the hens that are not showing signs of Mareks. Oliver, the rooster I found dead yesterday, was 10 months old and didn't survive three days being with the hens.

I don't know what went wrong but it is pretty discouraging. I have plenty of broody hens so I don't stand the risk of loosing all my birds. But not being able to produce a resistant rooster has me feeling like I'm chasing my tail.

Any advice? Keeping them separate to reduce breeding stress hasn't worked, neither has only puting two breeding age roosters in with the hens worked.

What might work?

 

[chickengr]

this little roo only had some respiratory issue (rattling sound, not lethargic, ate well, etc). I have recently noticed that the colour of his eyes changed and they look strange. what do you think:

 

[microchick]

I'm sorry those look just like my birds eyes that have Ocular Marek's disease. The technical name for it is iridocyclitis caused by a herpes virus so yes, it is probably Marek's.

I have one hen who is almost 21/2 years old with two eyes affected, one hen just a year old with one eye and one rooster, 16 months old with it.

Best advice is to love the little guy for as much time as he is given. Unfortunately from this point on, all your other chickens have been exposed and if not symptomatic, are carriers. Personally, I have closed my flock. Only vaccinated chicks come in. I generally hatch my own chicks and am working towards having resistant birds that are still alive at 3 years.

Marek's is a nasty, heartless killer and I hate it as much as I hate ticks that cause Lyme Disease.
to you and your little rooster.

 

[rebrascora]

I agree that it looks like ocular Marek's. I also read your other thread about paralysed pullets, which would tie in with Marek's too, even though you seemed to disregard it as a possible cause.
I've had several birds with Marek's be floundering on the ground unable to get up one day and a couple of days later, you would not know there had ever been anything wrong with them. Many had subsequent more serious attacks months or even years later. Others decline very rapidly and some I have nursed for months and made significant but not total recovery. There are no hard and fast rules with Marek's which makes the symptoms so easy to attribute to other ailments, particularly because it suppresses the immune system which leaves them vulnerable to respiratory infection, coccidiosis and internal and external parasites that bodies would ordinarily be able to keep in check.
Good nutrition with vitamin supplements to boost the immune system and supportive care is the best treatment I can suggest.

 

[microchick]

Sorry Rebascora if I gave that impression. Wasn't my intent. Like most people who are dealing with Marek's I went through my own period of denial, 'oh, it CAN'T be Marek's! It has to be something else!" phase. Granted, the first birds I lost to neuro problems didn't present as typical Marek's birds. No typical one leg forward one backwards paralysis in any bird till I had a young bird, 9 weeks old turn up with classic paralysis early this spring. I had a few birds that did present with weird neuro behaviors and seizures, (one seemed completely paralyzed towards the end) but even then what kept going through my head as I did research was that the symptoms just didn't add up. When I started getting the irregular pupils and my first bird with grey eye I figured out what was going on. When my first chick presented with the paralyzed leg, the alarms went off and when my husband checked the internal eyes on chickens with grey eye, I had the diagnosis I had not been wanting to hear.

It's horrible when the thought sinks in that you stand a chance of a good percentage of your birds dying. It's a lot like the 7 stages of dying. Denial, anger, bargaining, etc. Now I am in the resigned stage. I found a cockerel dead this week. No symptoms, he just died. Only 10 months old. I just sighed and said, 'okay, Oliver died' tossed him in a previously dug hole and buried him. Okay, a lot of them stand the chance of dying. Some will live. The ones that live will be able to produce resistant chicks for me

Now I know that there is nothing I can do to stop the progression of the disease.

Yes, I am very much grieving this turn of events.

I am one of these people who practice good biosecurity and can't figure out where the infection came from. And I agree. Good food, good water, vitamins, parasite control help, but it also takes very little I've learned to push birds over the edge and into the grave when it comes to Marek's disease

Sorry for the rant, I think it has always been in the back of my mind but like Cleopatra I was the Queen of "De Nile".

 

[rebrascora]

@microchick

Slight confusion.... I wasn't making comment about your post. It was @chickengr who posted a week or so ago on another thread about two birds with paralysis but stated that it couldn't be Marek's that was responsible. Now this post about the cockerel with apparent occular Marek's. The other two were I believe taken to a vet who diagnosed probable botulism but vet's rarely know much about chickens and Marek's is more common than botulism, much as people want to believe otherwise. It could also be that the Marek's makes them susceptible to botulism though. You are right about the denial phase that's for sure and who can blame anyone for wanting to deny it, because it is such a rotten disease.

When it started with me, I had 3 young birds go lame in the space of a week which made it beyond coincidence that it was injury. I didn't know anything about Marek's then, but I started researching. One of them did the classic Marek's splits which more or less nailed the diagnosis for me pretty quickly, but I did a necropsy on the first one that died a couple of weeks later and found the tumours which confirmed it. Since then I have lost a few and had some recover and some that recovered had subsequent, more serious attacks. I've seen others die suddenly from it with visceral tumours and others succumb to respiratory infections that the other hens shrugged off. I just lost a 2 year old to it that had a dropped wing at about 12 weeks but recovered and had been absolutely fine until December, when she developed a limp. She battled it for 4.5 months with supportive care before she eventually went off her food and I'm pretty sure an e coli infection took hold and I had to euthanize her.

I am pretty convinced that many deaths from coccidiosis are due to an underlying Marek's virus. People just don't look further than the obvious symptoms and why should they. I was lucky (if you can call it that!) that I had classic Marek's symptoms right from the start, so denial was pretty impossible. After 3 years I have now seen it in it's many guises.
Interestingly I had my first lame bird through injury this year and the difference between an injury lameness and Marek's lameness is so acutely different, it is quite obvious, but I didn't realise it until I had seen both.

Anyway, just wanted to set the record straight that I wasn't in any way being critical of your post.

Regards

Barbara

 

[microchick]

No problem @rebascora. When it comes to Marek's we are all in the same leaky boat baling as fast as we can.

I spent months trying to match up weird deaths to some disease that I could give them a treatment for and that would be it and couldn't. It took a year before I was able to put a name to what I was fighting. If my husband hadn't been able to pin a diagnosis on it for me I would have gone the necropsy route as I had lost 11 birds at that point, the majority dying from Feb. to present.

I had bought my birds as chicks from a NPIP breeder who when questioned about vaccinating assured me that they bred for resistance.When I told the Veterinary doctor that I talked to at Mizzou that he had a good laugh. Marek's is just so prevalent and in his own words, by the time you know they are resistant it's usually past their breeding ability. I've lost birds as young as 9 weeks and my oldest at 26 months. I figure if I can get a rooster to last longer then 26 months I've got a good roo. At the moment I have hens that are 27 months old and symptom free. Unfortunately I have three standard sized roosters that are showing symptoms of infection but still fighting the good fight and one who is symptom free. I have them separate from the hens right now hoping to reduce the breeding stress on the one that is symptom free and have bantam cockerels in with the standard sized hens as they can beat up the little boys and not get torn up as bad being mated by them.

As the old saying goes. Time will tell.

In the mean time I'm considering adding some Egyptian Fayoumi's to my flock next year. To quote Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest."Never Give Up! Never Surrender!