Evaluation of Broiler Health Status Through Flock Health Monitoring Program in Bangladesh

Abstract

Flock health monitoring program is an important system, used in the poultry industry worldwide to minimize the production cost, detect clinical and subclinical diseases and acquire data to make comparisons among the farms and identify the future research area. The present study was aimed to investigate the broiler health status through a flock health monitoring program using the lesion scoring method. For this purpose, a total of 540 broiler birds were collected from four different places from January to December 2017 and necropsied. Five body systems including gastrointestinal, respiratory, immune, skeletal, and integumentary were monitored with their 33 parameters during the study period. All the scores obtained from different parameters were analyzed and summarized. Among the body systems, lesion scores percentages were more prevalent in the parameters of the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and immune systems. Regarding age groups, 2nd (0-84.4%) and 3rd weeks (0- 78.3%) had most of lesion scores percentage compared to 4th weeks (0-70.6%). With respect to season, lesion scores percentages were highest in summer (0-87.2%) and winter season (0-76.7%) respectively than monsoon season (0- 68.3%). Based on different scores, zero was scored by the most number of birds ranged from 22.6-100%, while one was scored in 0-66.9%, two in 0- 15.2%, three in 0-5.9%, and four in 0-0.4% of birds, respectively. Flock health monitoring program is a mirror of flock health status that can be a great alternative for the poultry industry and manager. Thus, the flock monitoring program mainly emphasizes poultry health which can be a good approach for future disease prevention.