Sulfa Drugs and Coccidiosis

Coccidiosis, a disease of livestock and poultry, is caused by protozoan parasites known as coccidia. The organisms are highly injurious to poultry, the average mortality in affected flocks sometimes reaching 50 percent.

A few years after the sulfa drugs began to be used in human medicine, parasitologists began to experiment with some of them. Three of them, sulfaguanidine, sulfamethazine, and sulfamerazine, were tested extensively with considerable success, to see if they could cure or prevent coccidiosis in poultry.

In the control of cecal coccidiosis, the most severe form of the disease, satisfactory results were obtained by feeding mash containing 1 percent by weight of sulfaguanidine, as soon as bloody droppings—the characteristic symptom of poultry coccidiosis—were detected. The medicated mash is fed for 2 days and is then replaced by regular mash for the next 3 days. The medicated mash is fed again the sixth day. If bloody diarrhea is not completely checked, a third feeding of medicated mash for 1 more day is given following 3 days' feeding of regular mash.

To control intestinal coccidiosis, a disease not characterized by bloody droppings but by a steady decline in condition, medicated mash is fed for 3 days in succession, as soon as a correct diagnosis is made. Ordinarily a Poultryman cannot make the diagnosis because it involves a careful postmortem examination of one or more birds in an affected flock and the finding of the causative organisms in sufficient numbers in scrapings of the intestinal lining.

THE AUTHOR

Benjamin Schwartz has been the head of the Zoological Division of the Bureau of Animal Industry since 1936 and has done parasitological research in the Department since 1915. He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers giving results of original investigations, and of many other papers dealing with various aspects of agricultural parasitology.

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