Sneezing

[Bowenchicks]

Both of my chicks are sneezing quite a bit. How can I tell if this is just allergies, or a cold? it's been going on for about a week now.

 

[GuppyTJ]

Unfortunately for me, I have a lot of experience with respiratory infections as I lost one chicken to it at 4 weeks old. There are lots of different respiratory diseases chickens can get and the symptoms look similar (sneezing is one of the symptoms) so it's hard to tell which you have without either having lab work done or a necropsy. Chickens don't really get colds, I understand. I don't think they get allergies either but this I'm not as sure of.

Here are some good links to the types of respiratory infections/diseases chickens can get so you can try to diagnose what your chickens may be experiencing. If you go all the way to the bottom of the page in the first link, there's a really useful chart that shows you which diseases have which symptoms.

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ps044

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pwhjQ6Yng877iz_JNiCN1IQ

http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/2902/2902-1094/2902-1094_pdf.pdf

Also, The Chicken Health Handbook is an awesome resource for all things chicken health related, loads of detail on each type of illness such as incubation period, how acute the disease is, how to prevent it, how to treat it, etc, etc. Also has details on predators, parasites, biosecurity, increasing natural immunity, stuff like that.

Hope this helps get you started. Have a look and if you have other questions or ideas, please post and I'll/we'll try to help you.
Guppy