Why Babies died
Paratyphoid
I have believed for a long time that paratyphoid, or salmonellosis, is more widespread than people are willing to accept. I have even stuck my neck out and stated that I thought it is the rare loft that has no birds infected, at least subclinically, or as carriers, with paratyphoid. Good, healthy birds are fairly resistant to paratyphoid and most loft conditions keep it quiet. For reasons that we don’t understand, it will occasionally just spring up, go wild and reach an epidemic state in a loft.
The organism that causes paratyphoid is a bacterium. It’s classified as a gram-negative rod. This differentiates from other classes of bacteria, and puts it in the same class as some more common organisms. Other bacteria can be present and be considered normal, as long as there’s no disease. With salmonella, you cannot ever consider it normal. Salmonella is a true pathogen. The mere presence of it indicates subclinical disease – paratyphoid.
Salmonella can be carried and spread by rodents, wild birds, or other pigeons. It is passed mainly by their droppings, contaminating feed, but it can be passed other ways, such as in the egg.
On of the most common ways to get paratyphoid in the loft is from infected new pigeons introduced from another loft. You can obtain healthy looking pigeons from another loft, put them in your loft, and they start an infection or become infected. It’s just loft dynamics, and not completely understood. I think strays should never be allowed in the loft, whether it is common pigeons or someone else’s race bird. Segregate them, as well as your own birds that have been lost for several days immediately.
Many outbreaks occur in the breeding loft, late in the breeding season. The birds involved in reproduction reach a weakened state of health because of the severe drain on their body, (1) producing eggs in the female, and (2) producing crop milk in either sex. There is a drain on the body’s immune complexes, or immunoglobulins, during breeding. These are the globulins that are involved in the antibody production. Since so many of these immunoglobulins are incorporated into the yolk and crop milk, it depletes the body’s reserves and makes the immune system more vulnerable.
Classical paratyphoid is often seen in breeding cocks, where a cock gets sick and dies very rapidly. The bird looks fine one day and dead the next. This is a fulminating form that, for some reason, we see more in cocks than in hens. It’s not all in cocks, but it tends to be more prolonged, they often go light and show more classical symptoms including severe weight loss, mucoid “sticky stools, wing boils and liver diseases”.
Other symptoms to look for that make us suspicious of paratyphoid are eggs that seem to “go rotten”. These eggs initially have a developing embryo, but then it dies. These are the eggs that turn black usually. It’s not they are infertile; if they were infertile they would be clear the whole time. The embryo is killed by the infection. The salmonella organism can be on the surface of the egg from being laid by an infected female, or it can actually be incorporated inside the egg, during egg production.
Another classical sign of paratyphoid is youngsters that begin pipping but fail to hatch – “dying in the shell”. This is a major symptom of paratyphoid. It can happen for other reasons, but this should make you suspicious, if you get more than one youngster who can’t complete the pipping process.
Other symptoms to look for with salmonella are youngsters dying in the nest at an early age, especially between 7and 10 days of age. These youngsters usually develop diarrhea and show sighs of dehydration, where the skin gets dark red in color and it loses its healthy look.
Frequently, in a nest of two, one will get sick and die within a few days, while the other one will act perfectly healthy. This is not uncommon with paratyphoid. I think it just means that one did not receive an infective dose. Merely sitting in the nest is not enough to infect it. I don’t think salmonella penetrates the intact skin. I think it is usually ingested.
The other symptoms are sore wing or leg joints, but swelling is not always present, as may believe. It is caused by an inflammation. Salmonella gets into the bloodstream and often localizes in the joint. Classically, the joint that swells is the elbow joint, where you get the typical wing boil. This is very characteristic of salmonellosis or paratyphoid. Sometimes it seems the birds has a tender foot, and will be seen limping around. Often it’s paratyphoid. Other gram negatives such as E. coli and Citrobacter can do this, but the odds are that it’s paratyphoid. Limping can also be caused from physical injury, but if it’s persistent, and if more than one bird is limping, you had better suspect paratyphoid.
Sometimes with paratyphoid, you’ll see tilted head or the twisted neck. A bird with this symptom more frequently has PMV, which can be differentiated from paratyphoid. Paratyphoid can cause micro-abscesses in the brain, resulting in these symptoms. When these birds are agitated, the symptoms don’t worsen. With PMV, when you stimulate the birds, their symptoms become exaggerated. Another symptom common to paratyphoid and PMV is watery droppings, but there is a difference. With PMV, the droppings are clear fluid, which is urine, with squiggles of fairly normal looking feces in it. That’s not true diarrhea. It’s called diuresis.
With paratyphoid, if they develop the diarrhea from, it produces true diarrhea, in which case the stool is actually the liquid part. It usually has a lot of mucous. Sometimes you’ll see little gas bubbles. Sometimes the droppings will have blood, a strange colour and a smell to it, as well.
Other symptoms are weight loss, called “going light”. The two most common things to cause pigeons to go light are paratyphoid and severe worm infestations, especially stomach wall worms, and sometimes, capillaria worms. Worms are easy to rule in or out, and if you can rule them out, odds are it is paratyphoid causing the birds to go light, especially in breeding individuals. Blindness in one eye or both eyes could be a symptom of paratyphoid; so can loss of color in one or both irises.
Trying to identify birds in the loft that are not visibly sick but remain carriers or shedders is extremely difficult. It involves culturing individual pigeons. For some reason, in infected pigeons, salmonella often is difficult to culture out. It’s a fickly organism and you can end up with negative cultures when, in fact, it is still the cause of the disease being investigated. This is further complicated because salmonella is shed intermittently. You can’t take a negative culture to mean the bird is negative for the disease. You have to culture successively, many times, to finally fell comfortable that a bird is not a carrier. It becomes impractical so it’s rarely done.
Prevention
Salmonella can reproduce in the environment. It can live in the liter and soil contaminated with feces. It can live in the environment for a while, but not as well as it can live in the host.
We know that salmonella does not like an acidic environment. By acidifying the environment, it decreases the spread. Sulfur acidifies, so the sodium acid sulfate loft dressings are an aid in the control. Putting alkaline substances down, such as lime, has been suggested in old journal, actually can create an environment conducive to salmonella growth.
Salmonella can be transmitted through drinking water contaminated with feces. A teaspoon of Clorox (household bleach) in the drinking water has been used in lofts that had problems with paratyphoid, and it seems to help arrest the problem. My theory is that the Clorox creates an acid environment in the droppings. Chlorine is excreted through the kidneys, and combined with hydrogen; it makes the urine very acid. This in incorporated in the droppings in the cloaca. The drawback is that Clorox, in all animals, has toxic potential. Personally, I take it out of the water I drink before I drink it. When using bleach in the drinking water never add anything else to it. It is a potent oxidizer and can change other chemicals, sometimes creating toxic substances.
Vaccination is the best aid we have in dealing with paratyphoid. Paratyphoid vaccination cannot give 100% protection, as can PMV vaccination and pox vaccination. Paratyphoid vaccination, because it uses killed bacteria, can only produce a 70% - 80% protective effect.
A booster increases the odds. I recommend, just like I do the PMV, vaccinating all of your young birds as soon as they are all gathered, then vaccinate everything again, just before pairing your breeders.
Treatment
There is no treatment guaranteed to cure paratyphoid. There are some that give treatments a higher degree of success than others. The treatments usually involve a good antibiotic, the best probably being Baytril. The next best is Cephalexin or Amoxicillin. In treating paratyphoid, pigeons should be dosed for a minimum of 10 days and, in an outbreak situation, it helps to vaccinate while they’re on antibiotics. Vaccination does not have a curative affect in birds already infected, although it does stimulate their immune response to salmonella, so it has benefit.
Baytril is fairly harsh on pigeons, especially the liver. For that reason I don’t recommend training hard or racing while birds are on Baytril treatment. Amoxycillin and Cephalexin are easier on the pigeons, but ideally, you should skip a week of training if you are treating. Birds on the race team become poor performers, due to lack of vigor.
In severe outbreak cases, you don’t overcome paratyphoid immediately. You have to “work your way through it.” Sometimes, it takes several years of a good vaccination program, monitoring and having follow up treatments. But with diligence, you can work your way through it and do just fine.