The Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnologies hosted a meeting with representatives of the VIC group of companies, the Resurs group of agricultural enterprises, and scientific and pedagogical staff of SSAU.

Sooner or later, almost everyone involved in poultry farming may encounter the problem of coccidiosis: both large poultry complexes and farms. The economic damage from this infection on a global scale exceeds $1 billion.

The cause of coccidiosis is infection with the unicellular parasite aimeria. Coccidiosis in chickens can be caused by nine types of eimeria. Broilers are most affected by five of them: E. acervuline, E. maxima, E. mitis, E. praecox, E. tenella.

Young broilers under the age of six weeks are particularly often affected by coccidiosis. Infection of chickens occurs when oocysts enter the body — forms of the parasite that live freely in the external environment, which are very resistant to physical and chemical disinfection methods. Infection can occur both in the incubator and on the farm, as coccidium oocysts are almost ubiquitous. In order to become dangerous, they do not need an intermediate organism — they mature and become capable of infection directly in the external environment, and this happens very quickly.

The source of infection can be everything that surrounds the bird: food, water, litter, insects and rodents living on the farm. The pathogen is also carried with inventory, on shoes, clothes and hands of maintenance personnel, etc.

In the case of the development of clinical coccidiosis (that is, the appearance of all the main symptoms of the disease and damage to target organs), the death rate of livestock reaches 25-40%. And even the surviving birds begin to lag behind in development, gain weight worse (the average daily weight gain decreases by 10%) and become more susceptible to other infections. As a result, herd uniformity decreases, fattening times increase, feed costs increase, and the quality of carcasses deteriorates during slaughter. 

During the discussion, relevant scientific materials in the field of coccidiosis were presented, in continuation of the agreements on the transfer to SSAU specialists of developments in the organization and implementation of an in vivo test that determines the sensitivity of coccidium field isolates to coccidiostatics of various groups.

In addition to the main goal, diagnostic and educational opportunities were also discussed in the field of ensuring genetically determined viability and health of chickens, meat productivity of industrial crosses, which are possible with joint scientific and production work with GAP Resurs, a combination of specific technological methods of poultry keeping with the rotation of a new generation of coccidiostatics, detailing the scheme of conducting experiments on the basis of the enterprise using the capabilities of laboratories Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology.  

The meeting was attended by the staff of the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology, headed by the Director, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor Valentin Skripkin. On behalf of VIC Group of Companies were present: Sergey Orlov, Head of the Poultry Department, Svetlana Dorofeeva, Deputy General Director for Veterinary Medicine, Vladimir Balykin, Deputy Director of the Poultry Department for Key Customer Relations. GAP «Resource» was presented by Alexander Shpak, Chief Veterinarian of Stavropol Broiler LLC, and Roman Yefremov, Director of Cultivation at Stavropol Broiler LLC.