"MG is a slow spreading infection, and often infected birds remain healthy without showing any overt signs of disease. Once other complicating factors — such as environmental stressors (elevated heat, ammonia levels, dust, or cold drafts), nutritional deficiencies, other infections (such as infectious bronchitis or laryngotracheitis virus) — lower immunity of the flock, MG may flare up as overt disease.
MG adversely affects fertility, hatchability, and survival of baby chicks."
These are two quotes from the first website you gave me. The infection I had was not slow spreading by any means, nor did it affect fertility or egg laying. All birds continued to lay as normal, while coughing and every egg I produced went into the incubator. They still are going in. I currently have 150 eggs in the incubator and I keep that many in there all the time. As they hatch, I fill it back up, and every single bird got sick, and there were absolutely no effects on my hatching. I'm still at 98%. Also, if the disease was slow spreading, not so many birds would have gotten sick and well at the same time. None of these birds came from the same place! Not even a handful of them lived together before I got them. I almost got every bird from a different place. I have 70 mature or almost mature birds. I have a bunch of chicks that never once got sick. All 70 of the older birds haven't been together very long. I have never had chickens before in my life. I am familiar with birds, however, I grew up with hundreds of homing pigeons. So, I am very familiar with bird care and health. So, every one of the 70 birds was aquired over the last 3 months. A slow spreading disease would have only affected about 10 of them. Not all 70 at once.
Is there a chance I could have gotten the wet version of avian diptheria? Not sure if I spelled that right? Please don't walk away from me now. I'm learning a lot through this conversation. And having so many birds, neatly organized, on my 1 acre property; something tells me I'm gonna need this knowledge a lot.
