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wet litter
In general, it is estimated that gut health issues (enteritis) are responsible for around 50% to 70% of antibiotic use in most poultry veterinary practices in Europe.
First sign of gut health problems is wet litter, but causative agents can be multiple, not necessarily a bacterial problem as primary cause. Very often when wet litter occurs, antibiotic treatment is started without proper diagnosis or laboratory analyses.
An important tool to reduce antibiotic use is to improve and standardize diagnostics through a gut health monitoring system and to set thresholds when to start an intervention.
Clinical and pathological findings will result in correct diagnosis, allowing correct treatment (short-term) and implementation of a long-term preventive strategy avoiding antibiotic use. As it concerns a long-term strategy, supplements improving intestinal health can be used in preventative dosages. On a short term, when treatment is needed to solve an acute issue, dosage of the supplementation can be increased temporarily to a treatment dosage. It is clear that in the context of moving away from a treatment approach (with antibiotics) to a preventative approach, gut health monitoring on farm will become even more important.
Practical guidelines to perform a correct gut health monitoring on farm include:
Necropsy at least 5 birds per house
Perform the monitoring immediately after euthanasia, not on already dead birds
Enough light, daylight is preferable
Below tutorial shows how to perform a correct gut health monitoring.
We also created a gut health monitoring form. You can download it here:
