Gihei Sato

OCCURRENCE AND SURVIVAL OF SALMONELLA ORGANISMS IN HATCHER CHICK FLUFF FROM COMMERCIAL HATCHERIES

It is well known that contaminated hatcher chick fluff and dust play an important role in transmitting pullorum disease and avian paratyphoid infections in incubators. Lancaster et al. (4) pointed out that three main approaches have recently been devised for the study of hatchery sanitation. One important approach has been bacteriological examination of incubator dust and debris for Salmonella to assess incubator fumigation procedures. It can be considered that examination of hatcher fluff samples from commercial hatcheries for Salmonella will be a useful criterion for determining the contamination of incubators and the effectiveness of disinfection. However, only Gwatkin and Dzenis (2) have reported on this problem. They investigated methods of shipping chick fluff from the commercial hatcheries to the laboratory. Dry chick fluff, infected artificially, was not satisfactory for examination for S. pullorum under their experimental conditions. However, isolation of the organisms appeared to be better when the samples were shipped in broth. They also presented the data obtained from the examination of naturally infected samples applying the latter shipping method. The present paper deals with the frequency of occurrence as well as the survival of Salmonella organisms in hatcher fluff samples from commercial hatcheries which were not satisfactorily disinfected. Dead chick embryos from the same hatcheries were also examined.