@Shadrach I would be very grateful if you could give us some health news ! It's been a while now and if you're not recovering, I will begin to worry you are in serious trouble
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ah yes, indeed; home-bred eggs and bought-in hatching eggs need to be distinguished too. And the nearer any bought-in eggs were sourced, the more likely that they'll be carrying antibodies against whatever's in the area.
I have tapeworms (cestodes) in my flock ; about a third of my chickens have them. Contrary to roundworms, tapeworms have an indirect life cycle, they need a secondary host, meaning a chicken will catch them by eating for example most usually flies, or mice, or snails that are infected, so not all chickens in the flock are necessarily affected. Also contrary to roundworms, it is not possible to have tapeworms and be unaware of it, as they reproduce by shedding live segments in the chickens poop, that look like moving rice grains. Those segments are then ingested by the secondary host.
There are four different type of cestodes that affect chickens, not equally harmful, and from what information I could find the only way to differentiate them is by doing a fecal float.
I always say that I don't like to draw conclusions from my single experience, so I don't make generalisation from what I have observed, which doesn't seem to fit completely with the studies. For one thing my chickens have access to many preventive herbs either in the garden or in the food I give them, and it has not stopped them being infected. These include wormwood (artemisia annua), oregano, thyme, pumpkin seeds, garlic, fig tree, chenopodium, and probably others that i’m forgetting. I have also always given my chickens preventive herbal dewormers, such as verm-x in the first year and then a french product called soluvert, and also thyme, wormwood and oregano infusions about twice a month. It is of course possible that the herbs did slow the infection, I can't know, but they did not stop it.
My flock consists of seventeen chickens : eight chickens that hatched here under a broody but from neighbour's eggs ; seven chickens that arrived here as POL pullets either as rescues or bought ; and two chickens given by a neighbour. The local origins of the chickens has made no difference on whether or not they caught the worms, in fact, the chickens who have them mostly hatched here. The main factor I can identify is that the chickens who caught the worms are mostly the ones who completely free range on the property. Only one of the chickens who is confined in my chicken yard of about 500m2/5400 square feet has the cestodes. This makes me think that either the chickens confined inside the yard eat less live animals and more commercial food, either they didn't have access to the secondary host that carried the worms (the chickens that don't free range have far less occasion to eat mice for example than their free-rangers colleagues).
However I have also noted that the only chicken whose health seemed affected by the worms, is a chicken bought as a pullet. All the chickens that hatched here and have tapeworms are doing good health wise, at least for the time being. But this was true before they had worms, and the hen that seemed to be affected already was unhealthy when I bought her.
Unfortunately I can't find the link to it just now, but one of the most useful study I read differentiated anthelmintic properties of plants for different type of worms and in vitro vs in vivo, and the difference was quite significant.
Tax : This pullet, Annette, has cestodes and i’m not surprised - she wanders all around the place, eat all kind of strange food and barely touches the stuff in the feeder.
