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Tembusu virus egg drop: 90% to 20% in five days
Tembusu virus egg drop is the sudden collapse of lay after infection with duck Tembusu virus, a mosquito-borne flavivirus first identified in Chinese ducks in 2010. Laying rate falls from above 90 percent to below 20 percent within two to five days, and most flocks then plateau near 40 to 60 percent instead of recovering fully. Inactivated vaccines reduce losses but do not restore the laying curve. What duck Tembusu virus actually is Duck Tembusu virus belongs to the genus Flavivirus, family Flaviviridae, and carries its genetic material as a single strand of positive-sense RNA. The genome layout is the standard flavivirus one: a 5 prime cap, a 5 prime…
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Cutting Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Poultry Litter
Walk into a duck house on a dry-litter system and the floor looks like nothing much. Bedding, feathers, droppings, feed dust. It gets raked, topped up and mostly ignored until the next flock goes in. It is also one of the biggest reservoirs of resistance biology on the whole operation. A 2026 study that sequenced the virome of duck litter from four commercial farms has now put numbers on how much of that load you can strip out. Antibiotic resistance genes in poultry litter fell in a clean, repeatable order across four management groups, and the group that came out best is not the one most people would put money…
