Newcastle Disease

Maintaining sanitised and dis-infected surrounding with vaccinating the birds according to vaccination schedule seriously reduce the risk of infectious disease. Isolation of infected ones and replacement of contaminated litters with new litters (wood shaving) also reduces the mortality rate in the flock.

Nice article with lot of information, these days we have lot of ND outbreaks in Sri lanka. You have highlighted under vaccination topic "Do not use vaccines during coccidios or heavy worm problem". What is the reason for that sir?

General and lengthy article, bookish and theoritical in nature, most books will mention all that makes this article, what is required most is not discussed, the immune system in the birds, the factors that damage it, positively modulate it, the genetics of disease resistance, the quality of vaccines, the cold chain, etc needs to be looked into more than anything else. Most problems don't exist in the field as they appear in the books. The scene is different today, this is the main problem of the poultry industry today, and not ND outbreaks. The other problem is the veterinarians, they do PM, eye's work as microscopes, no microbiology work, histopathology work, immunology work is ever done. Guess work, confusion and quackery prevails, everyone wants to make quick money and make the others suffer. My remarks will not be liked by many but that's the truth.

While, the reason might be as result of low packed cell volume in their system resulting in insufficient immune system due to sucking blood effect of worms and coccidiosis in the intestine of the chickens. Mark you, ND vaccines act as foreign bodies (antigenes) first, by causing a bit stress to chickens follow by acquiring immunity against that strain of ND. So if you vaccinate while they are infected with coccidiosis and worms it means you are adding stress to chickens. I thing you should first treat the worms and coccidiosis fortified with minerals and vitamins supplement and then administer the vaccines.

Surely the authors have made a lot of effort in compiling all the information on Newcastle Disease that could easily be found in any good text book of poultry diseases. I appreciate Dr.Surinder Maini for his courage in being very frank in his remarks about the article. What we need today is not the same old information that can be found in books, but new insights and practical approaches that can throw clarity on the so called menace. I fully endorse Dr.Surinder's observation that most problems nowadays do not always appear as they are described in text books. The picture today, even with an age old and familiar problem like N.D. is much more complicated and confusing and therefore takes more than just matching the actual symptoms as well as the lesions as they appear with text book descriptions and jumping to hasty conclusions that often prove very costly to the person who actually owns the birds. In this context, Dr.Surinder has hit the nail on the head and needs to be taken seriously.
People should rely not only on vaccination and bio security, but also on sound management practices by keeping away predisposing factors and other concomitant infections, however minor they may be, that make the picture more complex and difficult to handle. A sincere and professional approach, using timely and good diagnostic tools by qualified people is a major requirement in combating Newcastle Disease today.