does anyone know why?...., page-15

DONT PANIC! Pixie
people have not realised that imu poultry product can increase weight by 7.5% or 130 grams on same feed ratios. this is a huge development,not only will farmers benefit but the environment,eg less grain demand,no anti biotic resistant bugs to worry about etc read this article you will have that warm fuzzy feeling for the rest of the night. good night!

Bernadette Nunn of ABC Asia Pacific’s “Nexus” programme reports.

NUNN : There are 40 billion chickens grown around the world every year for their meat. Australia alone produces 400 million chickens for meat production – and that’s before you start counting all the chickens farmed to produce eggs. Such intensive farming is potentially a hotbed of disease.

DR. MIKE JOHNSON, molecular virologist : They could outbreak in a shed and you could lose the entire shed, so you could have effectively 100 per cent mortality in a very short space of time. When you have large sheds of chickens and we’re talking about maybe 20 to 40,000 birds in a shed, you have problems of density and disease outbreaks in those big sheds and quite often the only way to control some of those diseases, and particularly the bacterial diseases, is to actually use antibiotics in the feed.

NUNN : Antibiotics have been used in chicken feed for 20 to 30 years, but there’s a worldwide push to restrict the use of such chemicals in animals that are grown for humans to eat. In 1990, Australia’s CSIRO – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - started searching for alternatives to antibiotics in the poultry industry. It focused on a biological approach to replace chemicals. The CSIRO has now developed an effective way of protecting chickens from disease using proteins called cytokines, in particular gamma interferon, that the body produces naturally.

JOHNSON : Gamma interferon is normally called up as the first line of defence when viruses come along, when certain bacteria come along and even when certain parasites come along.

NUNN : While chickens naturally produce gamma interferon on their own, a chicken’s immune system is poorly developed when they’re hatched.

JOHNSON : What we’ve done in our delivery system is that we’ve taken that chicken gamma interferon and we’ve given it to the chicken early on in its life, so that then we trigger those immune responses very early on and then give it the protection that it needs. I like to think of it a bit like a battleship in many respects. The battleship is the immune system as such. Now, if you’re going to fight something that’s coming over the horizon, normally you actually have to see it before you respond to it. The response then is bring the fighter planes up on deck and you fire them off, shoot down the enemy at the end of the day. What we’re doing by delivering our gamma interferon early, is we’re actually bringing the fighter planes up on the deck to start off with, so they’re actually there ready to launch and some of them are already launched and floating around so that they’ve started to arm other parts of the immune response at the same time and that’s the way I like to think of it in those terms is that we’ve pre-armed the chicken to take on whatever might be floating around in the chicken shed at the time.

NUNN : The gamma interferon is inserted in a virus to create a vaccine, which can be given to the birds in their water or feed.

JOHNSON : If you think about how you’re going to actually vaccinate those birds, it becomes a physical impossibility to actually pick a bird up and inoculate it, so you need broad range delivery systems and that’s where viruses have actually proven themselves to be very effective this way because they are stable and you can engineer them easily and when they actually go into the birds they can be eliminated very quickly and because we can actually then put them into the drinking water at a very early age, all the flock gets inoculated all at once. The virus itself naturally replicates or multiplies in cells in the gut of the chicken.

DR. ANDREW BEAN, immunologist : The bad bacteria invade the body and the immune system recognises this. We give things like vaccines with cytokines and that helps to enhance the immune response so that it can then deal with these bad bacteria.

NUNN : It’s one dose for life.

JOHNSON : And by the time you get to the end of the production period, there is no virus left in that chicken at all, so it’s in effect the same as any other normal chicken that’s brought up.

NUNN : In fact, in trials at the CSIRO’s quarantined animal facilities, researchers noticed a positive side effect of boosting gamma interferon levels in young chicks.

JOHNSON : The end result is that those birds end up ten per cent heavier at the end of the day and they don’t eat more food to do so, so there’s a nice balance there between the immune system - just knocking down bugs as they come along and the bird not having to spend all its time fighting disease. It then can convert all of the energy that’s coming in, in terms of grain and food, into actual muscle mass at the end of the growth period. If we can get birds to grow to a certain point in their production cycle and in doing so they use 250 grams less of feed per bird – now you multiply 250 grams by 40 billion and convert that to tonnes of grain that actually required, or you don’t need any more, you can actually then do another mathematical calculation that converts that into how many hectares of land you now don’t have to actually use to produce that grain and so it becomes an issue of, as the world population increases and pig meat and poultry meat become the preferred meats because they are so efficient in converting grain to muscle mass, you don’t have to actually destroy more arable land or produce more arable land to produce the grain to feed the animals. It becomes a way of actually saving an environmental impact in the long run as well as reducing the chemical impact that’s actually used in the birds itself.