Newcastle Disease in Poultry is a viral disease that is a highly infectious disease that is ravaging poultry industry despite different attempts at stamping it out. The disease is spread by wild birds like pigeons, roaming local birds and among birds in a farm majorly by excretion into the environment ( ie shedding )through exhaled air, respiratory discharges and feces which infect others through aerosol or ingestion. It's a disease with varying degrees of damage due to the type of strain of the virus at work in any particular flock. There are 5 different types with varying signs seen. From the highly pathogenic types that causes high mortality, production losses to the asymptomatic type that is almost without any clinical signs in affected birds. The economic loss to Newcastle Disease is huge due to mortality, to production loss, to cost of vaccinations and drugs e.g antibiotics, multivitamins etc and losses to rejected products i.e eggs or carcasses. The severity of disease depends on the strain of virus that is in question, age of birds, specie of birds involved, immune status, environmental management (presence of stress factors e.g high temperature, feeding and watering , spacing) presence of other Infections in the birds etc determines severity of infection in poultry. Signs seen which also depend on strain of virus include in per acute cases, sudden death, others include listlessness, increased respiration, weakness, diarrhea, torticolis, drop in egg production, paralysis, prostration and death. Classical vaccines of live attenuated types have been found to be many times not efficacious even causing post vacinal reactions that require medication with anti-stress, antibiotics etc which makes the disease management very expensive. Control of this disease is majorly by strict bio-security . The virus doesn't stay long in the environment because their resistance to many disinfectants are poor. Good bio-security measures consist of a) Isolation b)Sanitation c) Vaccination d)Auditing & e) Monitoring. All these helps farmers to get the best out their birds. If you can limit the birds from spreading the virus among themselves with the above, then your farm is better for it. This can be accomplished by liberal use of disinfectants that the virus is susceptible to e.g iodine based ones. To get the best of your vaccinations, strict monitoring of the level of immunity of your birds should be done. Also, because of post vaccination reactions of birds to the attenuated live vaccines, the use of new types of vaccines can be adopted like, Lasota clone vaccines which does not provoke post vacinal reactions, use of oil based adjuvant vaccines too can be adopted and the newer recombinant vector vaccine which is more effective and last longer than the former ones can also be adopted. If you can have Newcastle Disease under control in your farm, you have increased the profitability of your farm by a very wide margin.
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