Sandra Avant

A product used as a disinfectant in agriculture, food preparation, and medical facilities also kills a fungus that causes the disease saprolegniasis on catfish eggs, and it has the potential to treat harmful parasites.At the Agricultural Research Service’s Harry K. Dupree Stuttgart [Arkansas] National Aquaculture Research Center, toxicologist David Straus and his&n ...

Vaccination is one method used to help prevent the spread of infectious poultry diseases, but current vaccines could be safer and more effective.At the Agricultural Research Service’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, Georgia, scientists are developing vaccines to help reduce virulent virus shedding—excretion of virus by a host&mdash ...

New tests and vaccines are making it easier to detect viruses in chickens and protect them from the cancer-like diseases some of them cause.One of the latest tools developed by scientists at the Agricultural Research Service’s Avian Disease and Oncology Laboratory (ADOL) in East Lansing, Michigan, is a modified polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to detect unique genetic sequences of both M ...

ARS geneticist Brian Bosworth (left) and animal caretaker Reese Mascagni oversee loading of market-size catfish on a fish-hauling truck. Excess fish produced by the ARS research program are often sold to processing plants.(D3027-1) The catfish once ranked pretty far down among fish species as a lowly bottom feeder, but that was when it could only be caught in the wild. With the bi ...

Although the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis (TB) is low in the United States, the bacterial disease can still infect cattle, wildlife, and humans. Complete eradication is not likely as long as Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bovine TB, exists in wildlife, which can transmit the bacteria to cattle, and as long as available tests cannot accurately detect all TB-positive ...

It's not mother's milk, but egg yolk may be the closest remedy for boosting the immune system of newly hatched chickens against infectious diseases such as coccidiosis. A major disease of chickens, coccidiosis is caused by intestinal parasites—single-celled protozoans in the genus Eimeria. Disease-affected birds are unable to absorb feed or gain weight, costing the poultry industry more tha ...