Making Chicken Safer

What is the best way to keep intruders from sitting in your favorite chair? Fill it with your person at all times. Whenever I leave my favorite chair, it is quickly taken over by my teenager. When I return from foraging for a snack during a TV commercial that teenager is always smiling and looking up at me wondering what I want.

The best way to keep disease-causing bacteria from invading a chicken's intestines is to give it a good shower of intestinal bacteria before the bad guys arrive. A recent article in Infectious Disease News titled Bacteria cocktail fights Salmonella in chickens reports that spraying chicks with a mixture of 29 different harmless chicken intestine dwelling bacteria can prevent Salmonella bacteria from setting up residence in the chickens' intestine. Included in the spray are three Enterococcus faecalis strains, three E. faecium strains, an E. avium, two Lactobacillus strains, two Escherichia coli strains and a Fusobacterium species.

This is great news. The first infection I usually think of when I am handling chicken at home is Salmonella. By spraying the chicks with normal harmless intestine-dwelling bacteria first the Salmonella bacteria have less of a chance of grapping a foothold in the intestine. The harmless bacteria are swallowed by the chick when they pick at their feathers to clean themselves. These normal harmless bacteria then grow in the chicks' intestine, filling up all the available spaces on the walls of the intestines. If an intruder like Salmonella then shows up the good bacteria just look up and say, "what do you want? Sorry no room here."

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA; United States) conducted trials on nearly 80,000 farm chickens known to have Salmonella and succeeded in bringing their infection rates down to almost zero with just one application. This method is not 100 percent. Some chickens will still be infected with Salmonella. However, many fewer infected chickens means many fewer infected humans.

The other neat thing about this approach is that other nasty organisms like Campylobacter, Listeria, and disease-causing E. coli may also be prevented from growing in chickens treated with this spray. No antibiotics are used and therefore there is no fear of selecting for a super resistant strain of bacteria. The only thing the chicken farmer needs to do is to avoid using antibiotics in their feed after applying the spray.

Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is truly a wonderful way for chicken farmers to prevent growth of serious disease-causing organisms in their chickens. The name of the product is Preempt (MS Biosciences). Any chicken farmers out there needing to reduce Salmonella

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic