OBJECTIVE Our study provides information on phenotypes of local chickens and guinea fowl and their body measures as well as on major genes in local chickens in northern Ghana. METHODS Qualitative and morphometric traits were recorded on 788 local chickens and 394 guinea fowl in urban households in Tamale, Ghana. RESULTS The results showed considerable variation of color traits and numerous ...

Clostridium perfringens (C. perfringens) is an important pathogen in both human and veterinary medicine. Necrotic enteritis is the most severe clinical bacterial enteric disease of poultry induced by C. perfringens. Study was done on 100 broiler chickens (400 different tissues of chickens) in Southwest Iran. C. perfringens was isolated from different tissues of chickens (meats, liver, gizzard a...

Poultry management experts think in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of birds. They usually prefer systems which require a skilled mechanic as much as a poultry caretaker. As a result, chickens are often seen as some sort of odd little machine that has feathers, squawks, and struggles if caught. This loss of contact between the caretaker and his charges is often associated with lackof rec...

The effects of viral strain, viral dose, and age of bird at inoculation on subgroup J avian leukosis virus (ALV J) persistence, neutralizing antibody (VNAb) response, and tumors were studied in commercial meat-type chickens. Chickens were inoculated on the fifth day of embryonation (5 ED) or on day of hatch (DOH) with either 100 or 10,000 50% tissue-culture infective dose (TCID50) of one of thr...

Adenylosuccinate lyase (ADSL) and lipoprotein lipase (LPL) are key enzymes in the metabolism of inosine monophosphate (IMP) and fat mass, which are important factors in meat quality evaluation. In this study, we selected 50 hens from the ISA B-line layers and Guangxi Yellow chickens, slaughtered the chickens at 120 days old, and analyzed polymorphisms in the ADSL and LPL genes using the high-re...

In order to assess chicken T cell-mediated responses after immune stress, 200 two-week-old chickens were randomly divided into control group(C) and treatment groups (T1 and T2). The live I-type of Newcastle disease vaccine (ND) was taken as the source of immunological stress. The chickens in group (T2) were injected with overdose of live I-type Newcastle disease vaccine. After vaccination, the ...

Coccidiosis control programs such as vaccines or in-feed anticoccidials are commonly practiced in the poultry industry to improve growth performance and health of commercial broiler chickens. In this study, we assessed the effects of various coccidiosis control programs (e.g., in ovo vaccination, synthetic chemicals, and antibiotic ionophores) on immune status of broiler chickens vaccinated aga...

A total of 184 tracheas, 147 livers, 150 spleens and 148 hearts from apparently healthy and dead chickens were sampled and the bacterial flora was determined. The bacteria most commonly cultured from these four organs of healthy birds were Staphylococcus spp., Streptococcus spp., and Escherichia coli. Escherichia coli, Aeromonas spp., Staphylococcus spp., Proteus spp., and Citrobacter spp., wer...

Two experiments were conducted to determine the effects of essential amino acid deficiencies on several immunological variables in male broiler chickens. Essential amino acids were classified into five groups as follows: S-containing amino acids (SAA; methionine + cysteine), aromatic amino acids (AAA; phenylalanine + tyrosine), branched-chain amino acids (BCAA; isoleucine + leucine + valine), a...