Need Advice Quick

[Backyard16]

Hi everyone,
I have had chickens for over 4 years now but I need advise quick on this issue I'm having. I took in 6 young chickens {4-6 months old} and they were healthy. Well 3 weeks after being here they all 6 got sick. Now the sickness is not going away and now pretty much all 16 of my chickens are sick. I bought Tylan 50 at Tractor Supply and it seems to be helping them but after 2 treatments {1 week on meds, 1 week off, then 1 week on meds} the symptoms are still present in about 4 of the chickens. The symptoms that they had were nasal discharge, puffy swollen eyes, lathergic, gaspy breathing, and a cough or gag a lot. Now the 4 that are still showing signs are just that coughing or sneezing. Is there any other over the counter medicine I can use or what should I do? I have even ran that vetrx stuff in the hot air humidifier in hopes of no one else getting sick. I have the ones that are showing symptoms separated but I did notice other ones are starting to sneeze and cough again. Please help me out and any advice would be better than anything. I love my chickens a lot and hate to see them not feeling well. I also have sanitized the coop 2 times already and washed everything.

 

[Alaskan]

Stuff like that scares me....I usually would never spend money on a chicken, but with something like that I would take one to the vet and pay whatever they wanted so that I would know exactly what disease it was.

Otherwise there is no way to know how to fix it, or even if your property is now contaminated for eternity with some nasty something.

And think, it might be something super easy to treat.

 

[gander007]

Alright

great to have you here with us

Okay this is what my Grandpa taught me over 40 years
ago chicken bouillon cubes in to water then add to rice
serve flaky not like a rice pudding or you will choke them
the next thing is boiled or scrambled egg's with out the
shells and mashed up real good and do this for a week
if you do not have good results then you have a real
serious problem .........

Of course keep out of cold and drafts

And your chickens will always have this sickness

Or be carriers

gander007

 

[LilPoultryPatch]

Sounds like you have the same thing we had back in September. I can't remember what it's called but it is highly contagious and they may be carriers for the rest of their lives, but it can be managed and they can still live good long lives, especially if they are young. It is spread by bodily fluids. It spread very quickly through our flock. Luckily we were able to save most of our flock minus one. The first one to get sick was a young cockerel. He was so bad we had to put him down. We used Tylan 200 administered via injection under the skin, not into the muscle. 0.2 ml, once a day for 5 days. Withhold ALL eggs during medicating and for 2 weeks from the first day of injection. Our egg production went very low for those two weeks. We just boiled those eggs and fed them back to the flock. We also gave them a bit of Black strap molasses mixed with plain yogurt as a bit of a treat to help keep their strength up and mixed 1 tbs of Apple cider vinegar per gallon in their water. Try to keep their area clean and dry. Stress and dampness seemed to just aggravate the issue and made it worse. I hope this helps hon, I know it is hard to watch our feather babies suffer. Please keep us posted as to how they are doing. Sending you all my love!

P.S. We treated our whole flock, All 35, including the ones who were not showing signs yet. We don't have a vet around here that treats chickens. When we called our local vets they suggested we just kill them all because they don't treat any sort of fowl. We were completely on our own. BYC helped us alot during that time. Good Luck, and Welcome to BYC

 

[Backyard16]

There area is always clean and dry. They have their own 8x8 coop that was built just for them. Fully insulated with a heater. My feathered babies got a life of luxury. Now my concern is I got two hens one is a barred rock and the other is a golden comet cross both doing the sneezing now. They are older. Speckles the barred rock is almost 6 years old and Sweetie the golden comet cross is almost 4 years old. Now will they be okay? I have had them both for a long time and don't wanna loose them. Now Baby who is a bantam is showing all the signs and it just started. She was born here her mom hatched her out right in the coop. Baby will be 2 in July. The other one sneezing is one of the newer ones still. Her name is Crooked Beak and I do believe she is only about 4-6 months old. Now what is their chances of making it through this being that they all range in age? Speckles is doing better than she was but it's that sneezing it won't go away. Sweeties is improving a little bit and Baby just got her first dose of meds yesterday when I noticed she was sick. Crooked Beak just finished her 2nd course of meds 3 days ago. She seems fine other than the sneezing. What should I do to help Crooked Beak out? You can tell the sneezing really bothers her.

 

[Backyard16]

So I should treat all 16 of them whether they are showing signs or not? What would the correct doseage be for the bantams? My one bantam hen is no bigger than a pigeon. The rooster is an average size bantam and the other two bantam hens are about average also.

 

[drumstick diva]

Your new chicks brought this in, it was probably working on them before you got them. With the extent of this problem and probability of losing them - I wouldn't wait for advice to trickle in - I would go to a vet and get professional help. Bring in the sickest bird, and then you can get medication for all of them.

 

[Backyard16]

I did take the sickest one to a vet. The vet ain't sure of what they all got though.

 

[Beekissed]

There area is always clean and dry. They have their own 8x8 coop that was built just for them. Fully insulated with a heater. My feathered babies got a life of luxury. Now my concern is I got two hens one is a barred rock and the other is a golden comet cross both doing the sneezing now. They are older. Speckles the barred rock is almost 6 years old and Sweetie the golden comet cross is almost 4 years old. Now will they be okay? I have had them both for a long time and don't wanna loose them. Now Baby who is a bantam is showing all the signs and it just started. She was born here her mom hatched her out right in the coop. Baby will be 2 in July. The other one sneezing is one of the newer ones still. Her name is Crooked Beak and I do believe she is only about 4-6 months old. Now what is their chances of making it through this being that they all range in age? Speckles is doing better than she was but it's that sneezing it won't go away. Sweeties is improving a little bit and Baby just got her first dose of meds yesterday when I noticed she was sick. Crooked Beak just finished her 2nd course of meds 3 days ago. She seems fine other than the sneezing. What should I do to help Crooked Beak out? You can tell the sneezing really bothers her.

Here is part of your problem....a fully insulated coop with a heater. This creates a closed, humid and stale air system in your coop that promotes disease transmission and the heater is like placing those pathogens in a petri dish and feeding them. Chickens are not feathered babies and they don't thrive on a life of luxury...they have a feathers for a reason~so they don't have to live in insulated and heated houses like a human does. I know you feel like that is good care but for chickens it's deadly. They move from a heated environment to a cold environment and back again, they have stale and pathogen filled air and no way of escaping it. Add to that you have very old and very young birds, as well as one that has either a birth defect or a nutritional deficiency....all of these are more prone to contracting illness.

My advice would be to take out the heat, open up some ventilation and kill all the birds you currently have and disinfect your coop, open it up and let the air and light further kill off any germs and wait until spring to get any more birds. Then treat them like chickens...read up on preventative ways to keep a flock healthier and proper management so you can provide more adequate care for your flock.

What your birds most likely have is Chronic Respiratory Disease, or Mycoplasma gallisepticum infection and they will always be carriers and will infect any other birds you may get, and they will all be more susceptible to other secondary infections when their bodies become stressed for any reason.



http://www.thepoultrysite.com/disea...ction-mg-chronic-respiratory-disease-chickens

 

[LilPoultryPatch]

We decided to treat our whole flock because of the way it was spreading. We thought it would be easier that way than to just treat each one as they got sick and have to keep track of all of them separately. We had an older rooster at the time and we treated him just like everyone else. He did fine through it (though his hide was so tough it was almost imposable to get the needle into his skin). I don't know much about bantams, But For them, I would suggest only a 0.1 ml dose. We had several chicks that were still quite young and small, about 2 months old, at that time, one died but that was before we were able to get him meds. The 0.1 ml dose is what we gave them, and they did fine. Be very careful with the Tylan though, make sure it's under the skin and not the actual muscle because Tylan can burn them and cause tissue damage. That's why we did it under the skin. It took me and my husband both to be able to get it done. We didn't realize how much fight a sick chicken could give till we had to give them shots. Luckily both my husband and I grew up on farms and knew how to administer shots to livestock. I truly hope your feather babies pull through this. I know your nerves must be wore thin.