Poultry health and disease control in developing countries

IntroductIon In the last half century, significant increases in the productivity of modern poultry stocks have been achieved for both the meat and the egg production sectors of the global poultry industry. Synergies have resulted from advances made in all the major activities of poultry management and housing, nutrition and ration formulation, applying poultry genetics knowledge in commercial breeding programmes and better diagnosis and control of avian diseases. Of all these core elements, poultry health and disease can be the least predictable. Although poultry diseases from nutritional and metabolic causes can be of concern, the emphasis in this information note is on controlling diseases that are caused by infectious agents, which can exert damaging – and sometimes immediate – negative effects on the profitability of commercial operations. The development of an intensive poultry industry in many of the countries discussed here depends on the growth in number and size of small and medium-sized commercial poultry operations. The emphasis in this review is therefore primarily on optimizing poultry health for this scale of operations. Because of the importance of small-scale village-based production units in many developing countries, however, the poultry health implications for and from such flocks are also included.