I posted on this thread almost 3 yrs ago when I first discovered my chickens had Marek’s. I would like to tell you the whole story, what I have been through, and what I hope the solution is. I am not a vet or even an expert. I’m just someone who has been going through chicken hell for 3 yrs.
Before I got my hatchery chicks I had them vaccinated for Marek’s. One died in shipment and 2 died within 24 hrs. Lost the other half of them to Marek’s when they hit 6 mon. Most of them would just die. Found some in the morning and some in the afternoon. I went to the feed store and got an antibiotic for the water. Found one alive and was able to see the symptom: looked it up on the internet and it sounded like Marek’s. Backyard Chicken had a blog about St. John's Wart. I used it and the chicken got well. Several months later the run needed some bedding. I thought OH I can use grass clippings. 2 weeks later they started dying again. I remembered that Marek’s comes from the ground so maybe up through the grass. I removed all the grass and replaced with pine shavings. Treated the sick with St. John's again. No more deaths for several months. Then I lost the hen that I had previously treated with St. John’s with no advance warning. The next Spring I got more chicks. This time from a breeder and I didn’t have them vaccinated. When old enough I put them in a separate run from the adult hatchery chickens. By the time these chicks were 5 months old my hatchery adults went broody. I got 7 chicks total. Moved the breeder pullets in with the hatchery ones which were in the old run. At 7 ish months they started dying. Lost some to Marek’s, and one to star gazer. Nothing helped this time. By the early summer I had decided it was the run that I keep the adult JGs in. I dug up all the muck and dirt down 6 in. Then replaced it with cedar shavings. I disinfected everything. By the fall they had stopped dying. In Dec I lost the last of them to warts and star gazer. But I hadn't lost anymore of the adult hatchery hens. ??? In the late fall I moved the 3 adult hatchery pullets to the old run. These chicks from the hatchery hens had been in the old run for 5 months. They were 10 months old and 2 died from Marek’s. Once again St. John’s helped but didn’t cure.
After many conversations with vets, and other breeders of my chicken breed, and even the doctor at TX Vet Med Diag Lab who is associated with TX A&M. He said it sounds like Marek’s. Even the wry neck/star gazer is from Marek’s. He said that they get it from each other’s dander (knew this) and not from the ground or the grass clippings. It doesn’t show its self until about 10 months. There is no cure. (not even St. John’s Wart) Nothing I can spray with to kill it. Once they get to the drooping wing or stumbling stage they are goners.
Two of the breeders told me they had a similar thing happen to them with Marek’s. . And that there are different strains of merek’s, tends to be in the ground, different strains in different regions, and so you may even buy a bird from another state that is big and healthy but when they get here are exposed to a different strain of merek’s and will get it and die.
The strain of Marek’s I had my chickens vaccinated with came from Turkey’s. This made them more susceptible to other strains of Marek’s which killed them. The ones that survived became carriers. When I put the new chickens in with the vaccinated ones they got Marek’s. What am I going to do? Slaughter all the chickens in the old run. All of them! Then I have to dig all the dirt out down 6 inches. This dirt has to be disposed of OFF my property to prevent further exposure. I even have to destroy the coop because the inside wasn’t painted and I can’t disinfect the raw wood. All feeding and watering items have to be disinfected. Lastly everything else, the wood fence poles, the fence, the remaining ground, everything has to be sprayed down with bleach or a stronger disinfectant. Then we can build a new coop and give the whole area several months to breathe before I can put chickens back in it.
I hope this helps others. And you are welcome to email me with questions. [email protected]
Sorry to hear of your experiences. I will share mine, and some theories as to why they are so different, and hopefully our experiences will be helpful to people down the track, sooner or later.
(I would recommend you remove your email address though, we're not supposed to put them in public view, to protect from spambots. You could just say something like 'PM me for my email.')
When we decided to get poultry, we initially got random birds from backyard breeders, no purebreds to start with. None of these were vaccinated for Marek's or anything else. Later on, we got some Isabrowns, vaccinated with the whole lot of 'required' vaccines. To this we kept adding more and more mongrels, and breeding mongrels from those mongrels. To this we also added some supposed purebreds including Leghorns, Australorps, Buff Orps, Silkies, etc.
I had read an old herbal medicine farming textbook which I'd used to save animal lives before, dogs and cats etc, so decided to test that author's statements on poultry, since they'd been right before about supposedly 'untreatable' diseases which the vet would just recommend you destroy because they were 'incurable'.
So, I always put raw fresh garlic in their diet as a staple, used no artificial antibiotics, used herbs for treatment, kept them free ranging, and on as natural a diet as possible. Kelp is their main multi supplement.
Fast forward years down the track, I've kept many hundreds of birds on the same ground from hatching onwards, never used artificial medicines on them, and have had Marek's in the flock. But it only affected a few birds, with no connections I can figure out offhand. They went down as adults, died, and that was the end of that. I haven't had any problems since, no new cases, for years.
I didn't use St John's Wort, but would in future; I hadn't thought about using it for Marek's at the time. Natural therapies work by helping the system, not doing all the work for it, so using them on animals that have weak systems doesn't work as well as using them on healthy animals, but the same is true for conventional therapies, if not even more so. The most important thing is to make your animals as healthy as possible, and this starts from its ancestors onwards because even sickly grandparents will show their influence in the grandchildren, I have found.
The Isabrowns were healthier than any I'd ever seen, on the diet I fed them, still not comparable to mongrels though, but died from what appeared to be an inherited genetic disease around three years old. So did others from the same hatchery, raised entirely differently and not by me. Mine lasted longer, and one recovered for almost a year, but that was it.
The mongrels have outlasted everything else with the majority of them never being noticeably sick. There are no purebreds left now. I favor mongrels for vigor and reckon I'll always focus on them; it's totally untrue that you can't get great production and feed efficiency from total mongrels.
Vaccinated birds raised on conventional diets are the weakest, rattiest things I've ever dealt with, and I won't do so again... As I learned despite my efforts to 'fix' them, you cannot put the health back into them that was not given to them in the first place.
True health starts with the parents, and even the grandparents, and you will almost certainly not get it from a mass commercial hatchery. You get permanently weaker birds, prone to dying from everything. At least, this is my experience, many would argue, but by the same token many don't know any better because all they have experience with are hatchery birds. Some hatcheries do produce some good looking stock, credit where credit is due. America has some amazing feeds, nothing like the stuff you get here. For long-lived, hardy birds, though, I would really recommend you get mongrels or anything bred free range for generations and with as little as possible artificial healthcare as possible.
I also ended up with Leucosis in some of my flock, which was inherited through a few parent lines and which killed a few birds of varying ages, which I have since exterminated from the flock. Part of it came through purebred Australorps I got from one breeder.
I've never lost a single chook of any age to cocci, ever even seen symptoms of it, but doubtless they have been exposed to multiple strains by now. That old farming book specified that raw garlic would prevent and cure cocci and I've never seen it so it must be true, lol. Anyway, as well as Tuberculosis, and Blackhead, and a few other diseases, my birds have been exposed to many things which should have torn through the flock according to popular schools of thought on poultry disease, but only a tiny minority of the flock was ever affected, and even fewer died.
I actively brought in sick birds from many places, some of them hundreds of kilometers away, figuring to build strong immune systems in my flock due to the exposures, and traveled the flock many hundreds of kms moving house many times since the start of it. They've been exposed to many diseases and differing strains of the same diseases.
The only things I use to disinfect the coops and floors are hydrated agricultural lime, garlic, ash, and diatomaceous earth. I use the deep litter composting method, tweaked to suit my circumstances (I didn't follow the official method totally, just did what seemed to work, which worked beautifully). I use Stockholm (pine) Tar for some cases of scaly leg mite as well as any infections and wounds like fox bites, and it's a real life saver. Scaly Leg mite I found goes away by itself on the right diet but some birds I bought in were almost ready to suffer amputations due to those mites.
The sulfur in garlic builds up in the animal over a few months and makes them repellant to disease, harmful bacteria, internal and external parasites, and other issues. Some cases of scaly leg were so advanced when I got them that I used pine tar to heal them before toes were lost. It works great. Some on this site reckon it doesn't, but there are many processing methods and species used, and only one I'd use. Some have all manner of additives mixed in, but I use pure Stockholm Tar. I rarely used any treatment beyond diet for scaly leg and never treated the flock pre-emptively even when a heavily infested bird was brought in and shared the same cage and perches, and they never had a problem. They never got it. I've also never lost a bird to worms or lice, nor had a problem with either.
My best bet as to why my flock has had so little in the way of trouble is that I didn't coddle their immune systems and supported them through as-natural-as-possible diet, treatments etc. People around me, who often visited, whom I gave birds to and whom I obtained birds from, lost almost their entire flocks to disease (before I met them, lol, don't worry, I didn't cause it, I've been happy to expose my birds to disease but very wary of introducing it to others' flocks), but their birds put onto my diet survived, and the birds I gave them survived too. One breeder I knew lost almost her entire flock to Marek's. It was actually after meeting her that some of my birds showed it, but still it was a tiny minority. I brought some of her birds to my place, which probably brought the Mareks'. It's been my experience that purebreds are much, much more likely to die of it than mongrels.
I would guess that if you take a bird dying from Marek's and treat it, no matter how you do, it's still a very likely case for future death due to that disease, after all it was already demonstrating its immunological weakness against it. Even with natural treatments and diet, some are just weak; if the body cannot fight no matter what you do it will die, as even extreme treatments like chemotherapy rely on the organism itself putting up some fight. This is why nutrition and health are the most important defenses against disease, not anything you do after disease has struck. My methods (which I've learned from others for the vast majority of the time) have worked so well I don't intend to change them for conventional ones, as too many of them seem to be unending fecal-matter fights, lol... Pardon the phrase.
I know my animal husbandry sounds odd and perhaps even irresponsible but the results speak for themselves, I reckon, and whatever works is what's acceptable, as long as it's ethical and humane.
If you can get artificial treatments to work for you, then best wishes with that. If they don't work for you, as they don't for many, it could well pay to consider trying natural husbandry methods, even if they're scoffed at and scorned by possibly the bulk of your peers.
I'm not totally biased against conventional therapies either, I used to use them and would use them again for example in a case where I wasn't sure my level of experience and knowledge would be sufficient. There's a place and time for everything, just about.
I too was skeptical once, in fact I still am to a certain degree, but I am willing to test the theories and have found great success with them. I pointlessly lost some animals because I was skeptical, which was due to ignorance. (How can raw garlic possibly work like it's claimed to? I wondered.) Well, for that info, one needs to do a little bit of research on nutrition and the chemical composition of raw garlic. It has over 3 dozen powerful natural antibiotics, some of which are more powerful than artificial ones as confirmed by in-hospital uses and trials worldwide, and it's high in natural sulfur, but unlike artificial sulfur family drugs and antibiotics, it's not harmful. Every herb has a similar 'read-up', they contain powerful natural agents, most of which have modern artificial alternatives which are generally harmful.
There is a growing epidemic of livestock disease that is resistant and even immune to all artificial antibiotics etc and some of these diseases transfer from animals to humans, and many thousands of human deaths each year are being attributed to the irresponsible and extreme overuse of chemical and antibiotic treatment for the simplest of issues with poultry, like cocci. It's expected this will increase dramatically in future. In some places sheep owners are being forced to learn natural alternatives because they have quite simply run out of artificial options due to the overuse of antibiotics for everything including the common cold, so to speak. We're only making stronger and stronger diseases by using artificial means to defeat them. At the end of the day only a certain type of flock is going to survive, and it won't be one that's been artificially protected without developing its own true immunity, generation after generation. Diseases and so forth can't gain immunity to garlic and other natural antibiotics because they are dynamic and unique, not static like artificial ones.
Best wishes. Here's hoping your chicken hell ends soon. If you have any survivors I'd recommend breeding from them and building a stronger family line that won't go down to Mareks' in future. Better than continually replacing weak stock with weak stock.
I stumbled across your page and read that there is hope for our poor bird. We are on our way out the store right now to get some of the Hypericum you suggested. Even if this doesn't work, I still wanted to say thank you for giving us some hope and a possible cure. We are still however looking for accurate symptoms to compare to, we are still unsure if this is what we are dealing with, due to lack of knowledge . If you could possibly help more by reading my post threw Back Yard chickens I posted today for help its called umm...Help 
