Sneezing Chicken for 2 months "Help"

[Tracy the chick]

I have a Silkie/Light Sussex chicken, shes 16 weeks old now and has been sneezing for 2 months, shes been to the vets twice now and completed 2 x 5 day courses of baytril. Only symptoms are runny nose, watery eyes & sneezing. All chickens have finished a course of flubenvet and have tonic in there water. They have medicated bedding too. Any suggestions would be really appreciated as 9 chickens have died now

 

[Clay Valley Farmer]

Sounds like a tough go.

Sadly, many respritory infections are chronic and don't ever go away. When there is a flare up you can treat symptoms but the disease stays in the flock. With that many deaths it does sound like you might have some sort of more seriouse infection going on.

Just out to get me up to speed what is tonic in the water and medicated bedding? I've not herd of these before?

 

[georgeandmildredgoose]

sorry to hear you've lost so many chickens

if you can find out whats wrong you can hopefully treat it properly, i would get some samples sent to the lab for testing, why not talk to your vet about it?

hope that helps, good luck.

 

[Tracy the chick]

Thank you for your replies. Answer to tonic in water & medicated bedding. The tonic is just a chicken vitamin and the bedding is called unibed which is chopped up hay thats medicated and has no dust spores. I do think ive got a very nasty viral infection going on as antibiotics dont seem to work. I will just have to keep taking them to the vets, only problem is i have 22 chickens

we do have a lot of pheasants on our farm and sometimes i find them with the chickens so maybe its something off them. Thank you again. Tracy xx

 

[Clay Valley Farmer]

Just taking sick birds to the vet over and over is likely going to be very expensive and is not likely to solve the problem. Having the next one that dies sent for necropcy will likely tell you what you are actually dealing with. At least then you would know how to best treat or what the options are.

Also, just personal opinion, but reaching antibiotics for chronically sick birds opens things up to breading antibiotic resistant bacteria which make the problems even harder to deal with and do raise the posibility of getting a nasty campylobactor infection from eggs/meat ect. Just keeping birds around that have activ respritory infections and arn't getting better or staying appearingly healthy puts the rest of your flock at risk.

Medicated bedding and vitamins though they may be quite healthy arn't going to solve the problems either.