Tracking Bird Health to Optimize Intestinal Integrity 

Intestinal Integrity is the optimal functionality of the intestinal tract and is the primary driver of bird performance and profitability.¹ It is responsible for the secretion, digestion, absorption and transfer of essential nutrients.  

Establishing Intestinal Integrity is essential for preventing costly diseases such as coccidiosis and necrotic enteritis in poultry, which can compromise gut health and affect bird performance. In particular, birds with poor Intestinal Integrity have poorer feed conversion, reduced yield and reduced processing efficiency.^2,3  

Data Tracking and Intestinal Integrity  

Through data management platforms, poultry producers can better understand flock health to drive timely, data-based decisions and robust benchmarking, leading to improved performance and profitability.  

Diagnostic and health surveillance necropsies are essential for monitoring overall Intestinal Integrity and coccidiosis peak challenge periods. This involves regular necropsy sampling and lesion scoring from a small sample of birds to accurately and consistently determine how a bird's intestines are performing and which challenges are present.  

It should analyze multiple factors alongside coccidiosis to understand how gut health threats are affecting a flock and how they interact with one another.  

With this snapshot of bird health, poultry producers can turn data into valuable insights. This allows for monitoring of bird health and performance over time by tracking changes and comparison/benchmarking of scores through access to live data.  

Identifying changes in scores can then be used to intervene where necessary, in a timely manner.  

Data management platforms also provide insights into challenges, opportunities and trends, including the effectiveness of the anticoccidial program in place, when gut health challenges are most apparent, and the impact of lost Intestinal Integrity on performance and profitability.