Poultry specialists flocked to Orlando to get the latest on a new vaccine being tested for necrotic enteritis.

Combining hard work in the laboratory with hard data from the field, poultry researchers, veterinarians and nutritionists are gaining new insights into gut diseases that affect commercial birds.

Some of the most intriguing, and potentially valuable, insights center around how several diseases commonly seen in broilers—coccidiosis, necrotic enteritis and gangrenous dermatitis, to name a few—interact with each other.

Specialists say that poultry producers who understand those disease interactions and, more importantly, factor them into their long range planning, can further improve bird health and performance while reducing or even eliminating infeed drugs.

To help the poultry industry meet this goal, Schering-Plough Animal Health sponsored "Intestinal Health 2007: Innovative Solutions for Clostridial Infections," a two-day symposium held in Orlando that featured talks by several leading specialists in the field.

Attendees heard fact-filled talks focusing on a variety of useful topics:

• How managing the timing of coccidiosis challenge can significantly affect the growth of broilers. Scientists are learning that birds that are challenged early have more time to recover lost growth.
  
  
• How the presence of coccidiosis in the gut can erode the gut lining, opening the door to infections by Clostridium perfringens, the bacteria that’s linked with development of necrotic enteritis.
  
  
• How abrasive components in feed,such as hard grains and non-digestible saccharides, can irritate the gut and predispose birds to development of both necrotic enteritis and gangrenous dermatitis.
  
  
• How a new vaccine against necrotic enteritis can protect broilers from infection.
  
  For more information, including podcasts and copies of slides, visit: www.netvaxforpoultry.com/newsroom and then click on podcasts.

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