How should chick starter health-care medications be chosen appropriately?
The brooding period is an important stage in a chicken's entire life cycle. If chicken health care is done well during the chick stage, later feeding and management will be much smoother. How should starter medications be chosen during the chick stage? At present, the starter medications used clinically fall roughly into the following categories:
1. Disinfectants and preservatives. The representative common drug in this category is potassium permanganate. Potassium permanganate is a strong oxidant and mainly has bactericidal and deodorizing effects. The main opportunities for using potassium permanganate are farms facing repeated outbreaks of infectious diseases that are difficult to eradicate, or where nearby farms have already issued epidemic alerts and transmission routes need to be cut off, or where rearing conditions are poor and management is inadequate and flock-wide prevention is needed during the chick stage. The route of administration is drinking water, and clinically it is often prepared as a 0.05%-0.1% solution and used continuously for 3-5 days. When using this class of drugs, note: the duration of use should preferably be 3-5 days; the preventive effect on non-enteric routes of infection is not obvious.
2. Antibiotics. Using broad-spectrum antibiotics as starter medication is currently a relatively common method. Commonly used drugs include penicillins (compound amoxicillin, etc.), aminoglycosides (gentamicin sulfate, amikacin, etc.), and fluoroquinolones (enrofloxacin, etc.). Antibiotics as starter medication have incomparable advantages; for example, compound amoxicillin can be absorbed into the blood and has a good preventive and therapeutic effect on bacteremia and septicemia. However, antibiotic drugs also cause certain harm to the body, especially greater harm to chicks. Some antibiotics themselves are poorly absorbed, such as aminoglycosides; after oral administration, their concentration in the intestinal tract is relatively high, and besides inhibiting and killing pathogenic microorganisms, they also have a certain effect on the reproduction of probiotics in the intestinal tract. Therefore, it is not recommended to use such drugs for a long time or at large doses. In addition, antibiotics easily produce drug resistance, and the cost input is large.
3. Traditional Chinese medicines. At present, traditional Chinese medicines in clinical use mainly aim to improve the chicks' own immunity, so that the chicks are robust and maintain high resistance to disease. Astragalus polysaccharide is the representative of this class of drugs; it mainly enhances nonspecific immune and humoral immune functions and has an antagonistic effect on immunosuppressants.
4. Probiotics. Besides avoiding the drawbacks of the first three types of drugs, this class of drugs can also regulate the intestinal tract during the chick stage. Introducing intestinal probiotics during the chick stage so that they reproduce early in the intestinal tract and establish a healthy microecosystem at the first opportunity can make later intestinal diseases rare. Practice has proved that the earlier the microecosystem is established, the lower the probability of later intestinal diseases. However, probiotic starter medications also have drawbacks, mainly shown in that the probiotic strains in products generally do not survive long and have short shelf lives; the probiotics in the microecosystem may also interact with antibiotics in the feed.
5. Nutritional additives. This class of additives is mainly composed of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and carbohydrates. Adding this product can, to a certain extent, enhance body metabolism and strengthen the chicks' disease resistance. However, under normal circumstances, chicks themselves have a yolk sac that provides the various nutrients they need, so additional supplementation is generally not needed; excessive supplementation can also disrupt physiological balance and cause certain toxic side effects. In addition, when rich nutrients are added to drinking water, they not only provide nutrition to the chicks but also provide conditions for bacterial growth and reproduction. Bacteria are extremely easy to breed in drinking water, and poor management can easily cause digestive tract problems in the whole flock.
In addition, the effectiveness of drug-based health care is also closely related to feeding and management. With the same health-care program, good management can double the effect of chick starter care, while poor rearing conditions and backward management will greatly reduce the effect. In short, at the chick starter stage, every chicken farm should choose starter medications and health-care programs suited to itself based on its own management, rearing conditions, surrounding environment, disease prevalence characteristics, and other specific circumstances.
Guo Jianjun