Thanks for the explanations and links.
I’m still trying to get my head around a vaccine that is meant to only blunt the bodies reaction to infection & not actually try to prevent it....
the closest thing I can think to compare it to is like when my son was vaccinated for chicken pox (lol) and got them anyway... To me, the severity of his outbreak looked the same as I would’ve expected if he’d never had the shot— but the doctor said that, without it, he would’ve had such a severe case that it may have ended up being life-threatening... so it was a good thing he’d been immunized.
So, the Marek’s vaccine is like that? They could still get the disease, but it will be less severe than if they’d never been immunized?
So, in that case, maybe it’s possible that the three hens you decided to test somehow have either a natural immunity or just haven’t had a long enough exposure to get infected yet?
Kinda like back in the day when moms would purposely expose their kids to chicken pox, but it seemed like there was always a couple kids who never caught it, even with multiple exposures....
I mean, there’s got to be some percentage of poultry that doesn’t get Marek’s, even though they’ve been exposed, right?.... otherwise, there’d be no point in them even doing the test— They’d just say that if you
ever had confirmed Marek’s in
any member of your flock, then
all your chickens have it— period.
Another thought— What is the
false positive rate for the postmortem testing? Maybe that’s where the fault lies? Depending on what the false positive rate is, I could see it being possible that the ones that died never really had Marek’s..... it would be improbable perhaps, but it still could be statistically possible.....
I think your next step should be calling the lab that did the PCR testing to ask them what they think the results mean, given the history of your flock. And I think I’d also call the lab that did the necropsies and associated testing, to ask about the false positive rates, and also see if they have any thoughts on all this....
Good luck. I hope you’ll update this thread with anything you find out....
Amusing tangent: {I remember a family down the street from me growing up, whose mom kept trying to give them chicken pox because she wanted all 3 kids to get it at once and in her words, “get it over with” .... problem is, they never got infected.... she must’ve exposed them
at least a half a dozen times a year... I knew these kids thru high school, and they never did get the pox. It was sort of a neighborhood legend. As a matter of fact, I still remember their mom saying something to my mom about how she was afraid her boys would get them as adults, and then they’d never be able to have kids— so I asked my mom if it was really true that a boy couldn’t “make babies” unless they got chicken pox as kids— *that* was quite the “birds and bees” convo with my mother.
}
