Adding new chickens after your flock may be carrying a disease? What if the disease is likely present in your soil? (Blackhead)

[Ohio Duck]

Hello,

Does anyone have experience bringing in new chickens after dealing with disease in your flock? There's lots of advice for how to avoid bringing sick birds into a healthy flock, but what if your girls are the problem?

Over the winter I lost three of my six 4-month old pullets to blackhead disease. I dewormed my flock and cleaned out the coop. My adult birds and three of the pullets seem unaffected.

From my understanding, histomonas meleagridis lives in the soil. It may even be present in our earthworms. It's a single-celled parasite like coccidiosis, except there is no approved medicine to treat it. It usually infects chickens through cecal worms. So regularly deworming my flock can help, but it won't eradicate this problem from my property. There's also no vaccine that I'm aware of.

I'm hoping to get more chicks this year - right now I only have 5 birds and I'd like 8-12. However, it's not practical to keep them in my house until they are adults with fully developed immune systems.

I would especially love to hear from any chicken or turkey owners who've dealt with blackhead, but really any experience with managing a flock after disease would be helpful.

 

[Mrs. K]

I have no experience- but I wonder if rototilling the ground of the run would help. And you might look up liming the ground. But I have no experience with either.