What are the common mistakes made when medicating chickens?

(1) Blindly increasing the dose: most farmers believe that the larger the dose, the better the treatment effect, and blindly use large doses when using antibiotics. With large doses, some may have a certain effect at the time, but hidden dangers are left behind.

① It causes poisoning death in broilers or chronic drug accumulation toxicity, damaging liver and kidney function. When liver and kidney function are impaired, the detoxification function of the broiler's body declines, making medication difficult during treatment and disease prevention.

② It kills the beneficial bacteria in the intestine, destroys the balance of normal intestinal flora, and causes metabolic disorders in broilers, increased functional intestinal watery diarrhea, and stunted growth.

③ Bacteria very easily develop drug resistance. Clinically, it is often seen that some drugs used for not very long, such as ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, etc., have already developed considerable resistance. Using these drugs at conventional doses gives very poor efficacy. The reason is related to the use of large doses of the drug causing increased bacterial tolerance to the drug and the emergence of resistant strains.

④ It increases the cost of medication. Generally, drugs used at conventional dose 1 can achieve the purpose of treatment or prevention. If the dose is blindly increased, the cost of medication is artificially increased.

(2) Uncertain medication course. The general antibiotic course is: 3 to 6 days. Throughout the entire course, sufficient dose f must be given continuously to ensure the effective concentration of the drug in the body. Clinically, such problems are often seen: a drug has only been used for 2 days, and because the effect is thought to be unsatisfactory, it is immediately switched to another drug. It may be changed again in less than 2 days. Doing so often fails to achieve the proper drug efficacy and makes the disease difficult to control. In addition, there is another situation: a certain drug is used for 2 days and produces a very good effect, so medication is no longer continued, causing the disease to relapse and treatment to fail.

(3) Arbitrarily selecting several drugs for combined use. Reasonable drug compatibility can produce synergistic effects among drugs, but blind compatibility will cause harm, ranging from ineffective medication in mild cases to poisoning death of broilers in severe cases.

(4) Using drugs only for treatment and neglecting the preventive role of drugs. Many people have poor awareness of preventive medication and mostly use drugs for treatment only after broilers become ill. This fundamentally violates the principle of "prevention is more important than treatment." The consequence of doing so is that diseases are only treated in the middle and late stages, seriously affecting the treatment effect and increasing the cost of medication, while economic benefits also drop substantially. The correct method should be: clearly understand the common local diseases and frequently occurring diseases, formulate a clear early preventive medication program, achieve advance prevention, and reduce unnecessary losses.

(5) Ignoring the active ingredients of drugs and only seeking to use "new drugs." Clinically, such situations are often encountered: after using a certain drug for 2 days, another drug is switched to and used for another 2 days, achieving a very good effect, and most farmers will think that the second drug has high efficacy. The actual situation is not so, because the ingredients of these two drugs are actually the same, only their trade names are different, and the good effect was produced only because the medication course was completed. In addition, some pharmaceutical manufacturers do not indicate the active ingredients of the drug in the instructions, which further causes confusion in farmers' medication use.

(6) Insufficient attention to drug safety. Some drugs have a very narrow safety range, and the therapeutic dose and toxic dose are very close, such as maduramicin, etc. Farmers do not clearly recognize this during use, resulting in poisoning during use due to uneven feed mixing or slightly higher concentration used. Enough attention should be paid to this.