In Poultry farming, the most effective tool for survival and profitability is vaccination. Either one is managing a small backyard setup or large commercial, vaccinating your flock is very important for preventing disease outbreaks, reducing mortality, and consistent production.
Vaccination:
Vaccination is a process of administering a vaccine to stimulate bird’s immune system and produce immunity against infectious diseases.
Vaccination induces active immunity; it will result into production of antibodies and memory cells in response to antigen. This is long lasting and often specific to diseases.
Common hurdles during Vaccination:
1. Improper vaccine storage and handling: Vaccines are sensitive to temperature, light and time. They can get contaminated on exposure to sunlight or poor handling.
2. Low-quality water used for dilution:
Contaminated or chlorinated water may destroy live vaccines, that’s why clean, cool and non- chlorinated water is advised for dilution with stabilizers.
3. Poor timing of vaccination: Vaccinating too early or too late can miss the window of susceptibility and that may neutralize the vaccines.
4. Incorrect administration technique: It includes wrong routes, overdosing or underdosing due to human error, that leads to inconsistent delivery.
5. Biosecurity breakdowns during vaccination:
Shared equipment, allowing external personnel may introduce infections during vaccination. It could be reduced by maintaining strict biosecurity and disinfect equipment and limit external contact.
Benefits of Vaccination in Poultry:
- Vaccination provides immunity against diseases such as Newcastle diseases, infectious bursal diseases, avian influenza, infectious bronchitis and more.
- Diseases outbreaks often result in high mortality, treatment costs. By vaccinating one can prevents these losses.
- It reduces occurrence of infections, which also reduces the need of antibiotics.
- Ensure better quality of life for the birds.
- It plays an important role in establishing immunityand also lowers the biosecurity pressure on farm.
- Healthy vaccinated birds have better feedconversion ratio and consistent growth rates.
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