Elizabeth Doughman, editor, WATT PoultryUSA and Poultry Future: Hello and welcome to WATT Poultry Chat. I'm Elizabeth Doughman, the editor of WATT PoultryUSA and Poultry Future.
This Watt Poultry Chat is brought to you by Elanco. Elanco Animal Health Incorporated is a global leader in animal health dedicated to innovating and delivering products and services to prevent and treat disease in farm animals and pets, creating value for farmers, pet owners, veterinarians, stakeholders and society as a whole.
The Elanco poultry team works closely with integrators to deliver comprehensive, data-driven solutions that support bird health and production goals. Through a combination of technical expertise and on-farm support, Elanco helps customers safeguard flock well-being while supporting long-term operational success. Learn more at www.elanco.com.
Joining us today is Caley Ellington, a poultry technical consultant at Elanco, to discuss necrotic enteritis, one of the most damaging intestinal diseases in broiler production. More specifically, we’ll talk about how it impacts performance and the tools producers can use to protect against the disease.
Thanks for joining us, Caley.
To start, can you walk us through what a healthy intestinal tract looks like in a broiler, and then explain how necrotic enteritis disrupts that normal structure and function in the gut?
Caley Ellington, poultry technical consultant, Elanco: When we think about a healthy intestinal tract in a broiler, it really comes down to digestion and absorption of those nutrients that we're feeding them. The small intestine – the duodenum, jejunum and ileum – is really where that happens and where our key focus is. We’re looking at a well-maintained gut lining, those functioning little finger-like projections that are villi that are absorbing the nutrients. And then there's also immune components within the digestive tract as well. There's gut associated lymphoid tissue and peyer’s patches that really help with regulating what's happening within the gut.
When we think about necrotic enteritis, that kind of breaks down the whole system of a normal healthy chicken gut. Necrotic enteritis is caused by Clostridium perfringens. Clostridium perfringens is actually a normal bacteria found in the ceca of boiler chickens. But when it becomes a problem is when the normal gut lining is impacted by something like coccidiosis.
When coccidiosis damages the gut, there's an overproduction of mucus and the Clostridium perfringens loves to feed off of that mucus. They make their way out of the ceca and up through the small intestinal tract and cause overgrowth of the Clostridium perfringens.
With necrotic enteritis, if you've seen it, it has really profound gross lesions so large distended intestinal tracts. And when you open up the intestinal tracts, you see a diptheritic roughened membrane, that's in the textbooks classically called a Turkish Towel appearance.
Like I said, coccidiosis is the main predisposing factor that we think about, but there's other things that can lead to necrotic enteritis outbreaks in damaging that intestinal integrity like mycotoxins or rancid animal or vegetable fats. In certain parts of the world where wheat or rye or barley are higher fed in the diets and there's non starch polysaccharides from those, as well as stress in the chicken house. In addition, different management factors like hot or cold conditions and wet litter can all predispose to necrotic enteritis. So, there's a lot of predisposing factors that lead to disruptions in the gut integrity as the result of necrotic enteritis.
Doughman: Integrators often think of necrotic enteritis in terms of mortality or sudden performance drops, but what are the more subtle intestinal changes you see and how do those translate into feed efficiency, weight gain and overall flock health?
Ellington: As we were talking about earlier with clinical necrotic enteritis, it's pretty obvious you're going to have high mortality. And when you look at the lesions in the birds, you'll see major changes within the intestinal tract.
But subclinical necrotic enteritis is a little bit harder to spot. You won't necessarily see gross changes within the intestinal tract, but it can show up more in terms of your key performance indicators for your complex and how you're performing.
Subclinical necrotic enteritis can have performance impacts and impacts on uniformity, so those smaller birds can then have downstream challenges in terms of higher bacterial loads, even challenges within the processing plant and evisceration potential contamination. So there's a lot of downstream sequela from subclinical necrotic enteritis.
It's important to look at those predisposing factors and have good control over your intestinal integrity to be sure that subclinical necrotic neuritis isn't playing a role in impacting your performance.
Doughman: From a practical standpoint, what are the key management strategies that integrators can leverage to protect intestinal integrity?
Ellington: Unfortunately there's no one silver bullet approach to this. When managing necrotic neuritis and other intestinal diseases, it really comes down to a layered approach. And as we discussed earlier, coccidiosis is one of the number one predisposing factors for necrotic enteritis, and it's the number one disease in broilers in general.
When we understand coccidiosis, that can really help us with intestinal health overall. Looking at your peak cycling windows of when coccidiosis is cycling in your broilers can help give indications of when your necrotic enteritis challenges may occur.
If you're on a vaccine program where we know we're giving a live coccidiosis oocysts to those birds and will have cycling, usually the earliest cycling you'll see even from 14 to 18 days.
If you're on something like an ionophore or a weaker chemical, your peak cycling may happen later around 24 to 28 days.
Understanding the timing is critical so that you know that you're covering those key risk periods in your flock.
Beyond coccidiosis, there's other control strategies and tools we can use from feed, supplements, probiotics, enzymes and really focusing on good management is always a key component, good litter quality, that your feed consistency is minimizing the stress on the bird, etc. There's no one single solution in this. It's about stacking multiple tools together to maintain that intestinal integrity overall.
Doughman: How will integrators maintain intestinal integrity? What does the future of management look like?
Ellington: Going forward, I think the industry's continuing to move towards more tailored and precise programs. We know that technology's improving all the time. The way that we look at data and make decisions off of data is improving. We're going to quicker responses and solutions to things.
We're also seeing changes in consumer demands and the way that we're controlling our intestinal health programs with things like NAIHM. We might be getting more tools back in our toolbox for some complexes in terms of ionophors or using animal only use antibiotics.
But there's, there's certainly still a lot more to learn about in intestinal health and necrotic enteritis as well. It can be a challenging thing to deal with depending on the predispositions within your complex. And there's a lot to look at even on individual farms where you see one house that may be impacted and the rest of the farms still fine.
There's a lot of future research that we can do, but I think improvements in monitoring data collection and field evaluation will certainly help us identify those higher risk farms and help respond earlier.
Doughman: Thank you so much for sharing these insights. For more information on the solutions discussed here today, visit Elanco Animal Health at www.elanco.com.
Thanks again, Caley and thanks to you for tuning in.
