Poultry disease prevention and treatment has its rules: remember the five dos and five don'ts

????1. Dose early, don't lock the barn door after the horse has bolted

Every day, carefully observe whether the poultry's appetite, drinking, mental state, droppings and so on are normal, so as to keep timely track of the flock's health. Once the flock is found to be abnormal, medication should be given early to reduce losses. If daily management is neglected and the flock's illness is not detected in time, the treatment window will inevitably be missed, leading to higher drug costs and a high mortality rate in the flock.

????2. Choose highly sensitive drugs, don't abuse drugs

Highly sensitive drugs can shorten the course of treatment, reduce the amount of medication used and lower the mortality rate. Abusing drugs, by contrast, causes pathogens to develop drug resistance, making prevention and treatment difficult.

????3. Use combination therapy, avoid drug antagonism

Most poultry diseases do not occur alone; concurrent or secondary infections are common. Therefore, drugs should be combined according to the various causes to improve the treatment effect. For example, in treating chicken coccidiosis, other antibacterial and antiviral drugs can be added; when treating gosling plague, antibacterial drugs such as rifampicin and florfenicol can be added in appropriate amounts. When combining drugs, drug antagonism or side effects should be avoided.

????4. Treat according to the symptoms, don't favour either the symptom or the root cause

In some fulminant diseases, the incubation period is very short (as short as only a few hours), and the poultry has already died before the administered drug is absorbed. Most drugs find it hard to cross the blood-brain barrier. In such cases, treatment should be even more symptom-targeted, treating both the symptom and the root cause.

????5. Complete the full course, don't give up halfway

Generally speaking, every poultry disease has its own incubation period and disease process, and treatment drugs should also be used for a full course. Stopping as soon as things improve can only kill part of the pathogens or inhibit their activity; once the drug's duration of action has passed, the pathogens' activity recovers, which can cause the poultry to develop other secondary diseases and then infect the whole flock.