Chickens: Do you Vaccinate Your Small Flock of Birds?

[Henlus]

If you purchase small number of day old chicks, say less than 10, do you vaccinate them? Vaccines normally comes in very large doses such as 200 dose. How do you vaccinate 10 birds with such a large dose?

[Manihot]

I think one way to do it is to get the lowest dose you can find and put it in a quantity of water they can't finish in 2 hours. After two hrs, the water left is thrown away. Doing so will prevent overdosing.

[Henlus]

Nice idea manihot. What I normally do is to divide the vaccine in proportion to the number of birds. For example if I want to give 200 doses vaccine to 50 birds, I'll fill the vaccine vial with water and divide it into 200/50 = 4 parts. I'll give 1 part plus little to the birds and throw the rest away. I've always encountered sickness whenever I overdose them, but since I devise this method, there have been no problems.

[FarmKing]

Nice idea manihot. What I normally do is to divide the vaccine in proportion to the number of birds. For example if I want to give 200 doses vaccine to 50 birds, I'll fill the vaccine vial with water and divide it into 200/50 = 4 parts. I'll give 1 part plus little to the birds and throw the rest away. I've always encountered sickness whenever I overdose them, but since I devise this method, there have been no problems.

How do you divide it accurately?

[Henlus]

How do you divide it accurately?

Thanks for your contributions so far. I was thinking that if you have let's say 10 birds and 200 doses of vaccine (live vaccine). You add a little water to the vaccine to dissolve it. Then using a syringe, you get the volume of the vaccine solution to be 3ml. Then you do a little mathematics:
..
If 200 birds need 3ml of vaccine, then 10 birds will need less than that, so more should divide: 10/200 x 3ml = 0.15ml. So you give the birds slightly more than 0.15ml of the vaccine solution. What do you think?

[FarmKing]

That makes sense.

[Charly]

Thanks for your contributions so far. I was thinking that if you have let's say 10 birds and 200 doses of vaccine (live vaccine). You add a little water to the vaccine to dissolve it. Then using a syringe, you get the volume of the vaccine solution to be 3ml. Then you do a little mathematics:
..
If 200 birds need 3ml of vaccine, then 10 birds will need less than that, so more should divide: 10/200 x 3ml = 0.15ml. So you give the birds slightly more than 0.15ml of the vaccine solution. What do you think?

How can you measure something as small as 0.15ml accurately?

[Henlus]

How can you measure something as small as 0.15ml accurately?

You don't need to be accurate. Overdosing a little will cause no harm. It is too much overdose that's harmful. Also, there are 2ml syringes you can use.