A stimbiotic as an innovative concept to decrease Salmonella cecal count and improve growth performance in broilers chicken

Salmonella control in poultry flocks and its public health impact is crucial. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of a stimbiotic (Signis, AB Vista, Marlborough, UK). A total of 900 day-old chicks were randomly allocated to 60 pens. The trial design was a complete 2 × 2 × 2 factorial with 2 based diets, a standard commercial diet with (PC) or without a multi NSP enzyme and a prebiotic (NC), with or without the stimbiotic at 100 g/ton of feed fed to males or females. Body weight (BW), feed intake (FI), and livability were recorded per pen. The feed conversion ratio was corrected for mortality (mFCR) and BW (mbwcFCR). Four birds per pen were randomly selected and cecal content collected and pooled for the enumeration of Salmonella by most probable number (MPN) test culture. Performance data were submitted to a 2-way ANOVA, means were separated using a Student’s test with significance accepted when P ≤ 0.05. Livability and Salmonella MPN were analyzed by Chi-squared where means were separated using Wilcoxon test. Contingency analysis was performed on the presence/absence % of Salmonella. No effect was observed on livability. For almost all criteria tested there was an interaction between the stimbiotic and sex, which means in this study a greater effect in males. An interaction between diet and stimbiotic was noticed on Salmonella count (P < 0.05), which was reduced for birds fed the stimbiotic, but this effect was more pronounced when supplemented on top of the NC. As a result, the proportion of Salmonella positivity was reduced from 26.7% to 13.3% when the stimbiotic was supplemented regardless of the diet. There was an interaction between the diet and the stimbiotic on mFCR (P < 0.05), mbwcFCR (P < 0.05), and FI (P < 0.05), with a larger effect noticed when supplemented to NC. In conclusion, birds fed the stimbiotic showed better performance while reducing Salmonella positivity, irrespective of sex and diet. Thus, the stimbiotic can serve as a nutritional strategy to improve performance and gut resilience mitigating Salmonella proliferation in the intestinal tract.

Key Words: stimbiotic, Salmonella, gut resilience, performance.

Presented at the 9th Symposium on Gut Health in Production of Food Animals, St. Louis, USA, 2021. For information on the next edition, click here.