One of the most effective methods for preventing disease outbreaks to ensure poultry health and productivity is vaccination. Farms of different scales around the world implement strict vaccination procedures to ensure optimal production outcomes and their flock's welfare. However, despite using the best vaccines available on the market, we still see many incidents of disease outbreaks amongst flocks, that can lead to morbidity, mortality and significant losses in production for farms.
In injected vaccines, killed or inactivated viruses are administered in order to stimulate an immunological response using antigens for specific viruses or bacterias. Since they usually produce a weaker response than live vaccines, they often require repeated administration over time to preserve a sufficient level of immunity.
Farm owners invest significant resources in purchasing high-quality vaccines and hiring professional vaccination crews to administer them individually to each bird. However the results can be less than satisfactory - this is usually due to misapplication errors that occur during the vaccination process and are significantly influenced by the operator's fatigue, technical ability and work pace.
Until a few years ago, the common practice for administering injected vaccines was using the traditional injection equipment (AKA the manual injectors). However, with the evolvement of technology and the demand for improved vaccination process outcomes, we can see more and more farms seeking advanced technological solutions, like the pHi-Tech vaccination system for poultry (PVX100). These solutions provide farm managers and veterinarians with the tools they need to track and monitor the vaccination process parameters, both in real time (to ensure immediate response by reinjecting the missed bird), and post-vaccination (by analysing the data to improve).
A group of Purdue University students, faculty, and farm management personnel decided to put the pHi-Tech vaccination system to the test. Their aim was to reduce the frequency of vaccine misapplications by comparing the vaccination results of flock vaccinated with pHi-Tech and flock vaccinated with traditional vaccination equipment.
To evaluate effectivity, titers were measured using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit.
They found that the flock vaccinated with the pHi-Tech system "produced significantly higher antibody titers compared to the traditional vaccine equipment". Moreover, the pHi-Tech flock also "produced antibody titers with a lower coefficient of variation (CV) than the traditional vaccine equipment, indicating that they had a much more uniform vaccine response compared to the traditional vaccination equipment".
To summarize, the pHi-Tech system improved vaccine titers and uniformity in vaccine response, indicating better disease protection, which allowed monitoring of vaccination efficacy and efficiency, reducing misapplication.
Click here for the full article - https://edustore.purdue.edu/item.asp?Item_Number=AS-690-W