Nutritional Interactions with Live Coccidiosis Vaccines in Poultry

The Problem: 

Coccidiosis is the most prevalent disease in commercial poultry production. As an enteric disease, it directly impacts how efficiently the bird can use nutrients. The most effective anticoccidial drugs also have some antibiotic activity, so as producers move to “no antibiotics ever” production, control becomes challenging. Live vaccines are available but also cause intestinal disruption as the bird develops immunity. This research aimed to characterize the nutritional impacts of live coccidiosis vaccines to develop feeding strategies that support health and performance of vaccinated birds.

The Research

Trials were conducted to determine how the bird’s ability to use nutrients in commonly used diets and individual feed ingredients such as corn, soybean meal, and distiller’s dried grains with solubles is affected by coccidiosis vaccination. The trials were developed to indicate possible dietary changes that could enhance the performance of broilers given a live coccidiosis vaccine.

These trials indicated that coccidiosis vaccines affected the bird’s use of dietary lipids, or fats, to a much greater extent than proteins and carbohydrates. A follow up trial was conducted to determine if adding soybean oil in the starter diet could account for vaccine-induced reductions in lipid digestibility, broiler live performance, and meat yield.

It was determined that increasing the amount of added soy oil didn’t help birds compensate for a reduction in lipid digestibility during coccidiosis vaccine cycling. In fact, additional soy oil proved detrimental to the feed efficiency of coccidiosis-vaccinated birds. Ongoing analyses should reveal some of the reasons why coccidiosis vaccination impairs a bird’s ability to use fats in its diet.

The Bottom Line

Feeding a standard diet, or one with reduced lipids, to coccidiosis-vaccinated broilers not only improves the intestinal health and live performance of the birds, it will also save producers the cost of adding supplemental fat.

The Researcher

Research Highlights  »  Animal Production