The life cycle of worms mean that getting rid of these pesky beasties can be particularly hard. Your chickens can directly or indirectly ingest worm eggs. Direct ingestion means they will eat the worm egg.
Indirect ingestion means they will eat a worm or another bug that is the host of the worm egg. The worms will then happily live inside your chicken reproducing and laying eggs which will be passed out in your chickens droppings and the cycle begins again. If your chickens are infected it is much easier to get rid of the worms if you move your chickens to a new grazing area regularly. It can be hard to tell if your chickens have worms which is why prevention and regular worming is important.
A chicken with worms will go off lay, may have diarrhoea, will eat more, and in severe cases will lose weight. A serious infection can be fatal. Chickens with Gapeworm will stretch their neck gasping for air. Preventing worms is much easier to do than to treat a worm infection. You can prevent worms using a number of products. Omlet stock a range of herbal worming treatments such as Verm-X that can be administered to your chickens feed or water every month.
Your other option for prevention of worms is a to use a chemical called Flubenvet which can be administered every months. Apple cider vinegar is another natural remedy that is not only a natural wormer but good for your chickens overall health.
A teaspoon of this per litre of water regularly will be sufficient to keep your chickens in tip top condition. The moisture draws them out. After dark, use a flashlight, pick them off and throw them out in a plastic bag. Although unpleasant and time-consuming, doing this on a daily basis in the beginning can vastly reduce the number of snails and slugs in areas available to your flock; eventually a weekly picking should suffice. Careful management can keep your flock relatively free from tapeworms.
This includes regularly cleaning litter from the coop floor and disposing of it in an area inaccessible to chickens. Use appropriate insecticides in coops or free-range areas when birds aren't present. As the Merck Veterinary Manual points out, doing so can destroy intermediate hosts, thus interrupting the tapeworm's life cycle. Regularly treating your backyard flock with dewormers that are effective against other types of intestinal parasites can keep tapeworms to a minimum.
These include fenbendazole, sold under the brand name Panacur. Each treatment requires two doses, given seven to 10 days apart. After dosing your chickens, throw out any eggs laid during the treatment period and for the next seven days. Other species of small roundworms are found in the lower intestinal tract and cause inflammation, hemorrhage, and erosion of the intestinal lining. Heavy infestations result in reduced growth, reduced egg production, and reduced fertility.
Severe infestations can lead to death. If present in large numbers, these worms can be seen during necropsy examination after death. Small roundworm eggs are very small and difficult to see in bird droppings without a microscope. Medications that contain levamisole are effective in treating small roundworms. Cecal worms are commonly found in chickens. As the name implies, they grow in the ceca two blind pouches at the junction of the small and large intestines.
Although cecal worms typically do not affect chickens, the worms can carry Histomonas melegridis , a species of protozoan parasite that causes histomoniasis blackhead in turkeys. Turkeys can contract histomoniasis by eating chicken manure containing infected cecal worm eggs or earthworms that have ingested infected cecal worm eggs. So, although chickens generally are immune to problems caused by cecal worms, controlling the worms is still important for turkey health.
Levamisole is effective in controlling cecal worms. Several species of tapeworms cestodes affect poultry. They range in size from very small not visible to the naked eye to more than 12 inches long. Tapeworms are made up of multiple flat sections. The sections are shed in groups of two or three daily.
Each section of tapeworm contains hundreds of eggs, and each tapeworm is capable of shedding millions of eggs in its lifetime. Each species of tapeworm attaches to a different section of the digestive tract. A tapeworm attaches itself by using four pairs of suckers located on its head. Most tapeworms are host specific, with chicken tapeworms affecting only chickens, and so on. Tapeworms require an intermediate host to complete their life cycle.
These intermediate hosts include ants, beetles, houseflies, slugs, snails, earthworms, and termites. For birds kept in cages, the most likely host is the housefly. For those raised on litter, intermediate hosts include termites and beetles. For free-range birds, snails and earthworms can serve as intermediate hosts. There are no approved medications for use against tapeworms, so controlling the intermediate hosts of tapeworms is vital in preventing initial infections and reducing the risk of reinfection.
Because the intermediate hosts for tapeworms vary greatly, it is important to identify the tapeworm species to target prevention efforts toward the correct intermediate host. Protozoa are single-celled organisms found in most habitats, and they include some parasitic pathogens of humans and domestic animals.
Protozoan parasites that are important to backyard poultry growers are coccidia species of the Eimeria genus , cryptosporidia Cryptosporidium baileyi , and histomonads H.
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