Chicken Pox
Categories:
Poultry Keeping
My one and two-year-old fowls are getting scabby combs. It starts with a
round blackish spot and swells into many spots, finally nearly covering
one side of the comb. Sometimes accompanying this is the closing of one
eye, and later both eyes.
The trouble is chicken pox, which is a very contagious disease. A
treatment which has been successful consists in bathing the sores with
strong salt and water and giving the fowls a mash containing one
teaspoonful of calcium sulphide for each 25 hens. With a large flock of
hens the method successfully employed by one of the large coast ranches
in stamping out an epidemic of the disease was to place a sulphur
smudge, to which had been added a little carbolic acid, in the poultry
house after the fowls had gone to roost. This was allowed to remain till
the fowls began to sneeze, when it was instantly removed. The affected
fowls were also treated by dipping the heads in a solution of
permanganate of potash.