(Veterinary) medicines

Antibiotics are the most important group of medicines (veterinary medicines) in pigeon racing. Due to the way pigeon racing is conducted, there are enormous contamination possibilities, especially through the collective transportation that take place weekly during the pigeon season.

Diseases such as ornithosis complex, trichomoniasis, E-coli infections, coccidiosis and worm infections are respectively the most important ‘troublemakers’, besides of course the important viral diseases like PMV and pox. It is remarkable that, for example, paratyphus (salmonella) occurs about 10 times less in the flying season than during the cold, wet season (September to March). It often seems as if the paratyphus infection in several cases is contracted in the flying season, but only manifests itself at the end of the moulting period. The pigeons are then latently infected (without any symptoms) and by perceived weakening due to the moulting and the cold, wet period, they get the so-called clinical paratyphus.

Vaccines

It may strike you, dear reader, that I am not talking about Circoviruses and Herpesviruses, because I am convinced that they are ubiquitous in our pigeons and, unlike E-coli bacteria and Chlamydia for example, do not play a significant role. When some veterinarians recommend circovirus vaccines (primarily developed for pigs) to prevent the ‘adeno-coli’ syndrome, I have some trouble with that! The same goes for the Herpes combi vaccines. Half of the users think it works and the other half think it doesn’t! That’s of no use to me. That’s totally inadequate, as far as I’m concerned. A vaccine must be at least 75% effective, if you get what I mean. It’s not much better with Salmonella vaccines. The only vaccines that work well are PMV vaccines, almost 100%, and pox vaccines, I would say 75%! The rest are just an ‘expensive’ hope!

Antibiotic resistance

I came across some interesting articles on antibiotic resistance and the human/animal relationship. Views seem to have changed completely in the past ten years. Antibiotics have a dubious reputation with many laypeople. This is because of the resistance problems that have arisen in some places due to irresponsible use, especially in the human population, but also in intensive livestock farming. These antibiotics were and are, of course, desperately needed to overcome infectious bacterial diseases. It is interesting to know that ‘antibiotic resistance’ is not new and has been present in bacteria for centuries, long before antibiotics were discovered by humans as a medicine (Sir Alexander Fleming: penicillin in 1929!). These only became commercialised in 1941 by Florey and Chain. Bacteria protect themselves against natural antibiotics produced by other micro-organisms in their vicinity. The presence of resistance genes in the microbiome (the bacterial population in your intestines) of people who never came into contact with antibiotics was recently illustrated in a study on the resistome (collection of resistance genes in, for example, the microbiome) of a Yanomami Indian tribe in the Amazon region. This tribe of hunter-gatherers, which was only discovered in 2009, is completely isolated from the outside world and the members of this tribe have never been in contact with antibiotics. Nevertheless, several dozen different resistance genes (resistome) were found in their microbiome.

Adeno-coli syndrome

It has also become clear that resistance can be exchanged between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria. It is therefore important not only to research the antibiotics, but also to closely monitor the development of the resistome. It is my conviction, and I’ve been saying this for more than 30 years, that our ‘Adeno-coli’ (in German ‘Jungtierkrankheit’ and in English ‘Young Bird Disease’) is mainly an E-coli problem. And the fact that sometimes one drug works better than another, along with annual changes in active ingredients, has given me the impression for many years that the ‘resistance’ of coli-bacteria can change quickly.