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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.



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