Clearing out

[Myzomela]

I guess we all come at it from a slightly different perspective so our views may differ.

As EOrix states, we are all entitled to our opinions which usually reflect our different experiences.

It's all good!

[BrettB]

Isn't it great that the wild red-brows come and visit our aviaries? But they also visit the aviaries down the road, the chook pens etc etc, then come back to your aviaries.

When I read this I thought of children rather than finches, and particularly the increased rate of colds and flu's they experience once starting to attend daycare and school. Invariably these end up infecting their parents as well
Superficially this would appear to support Myzo's position, but these illnesses thankfully result in negligible deaths.
If you take a longer view of the history of human health, the vast bulk of improvement is the result of improved nutrition and sanitation.
Restricting movement has rarely been successful or necessary
Should we aim to keep our birds completely isolated from all pathogens? I am yet to be convinced.

Cheers
Brett

[elferoz777]

The biggest risk to our birds is foolish over medicating and the spreading of MROs.

Super bugs aren't made solely in hospitals, twits create them in aviaries

[iaos]

The biggest risk to our birds is foolish over medicating and the spreading of MROs.

Super bugs aren't made solely in hospitals, twits create them in aviaries

As does not medicating as per the directions on the product.

[E Orix]

Myzo
I haven't left the Arena yet,still thinking.

[SamDavis]

The biggest risk to our birds is foolish over medicating and the spreading of MROs.

I thought MROs had something to do with checking the drugs in sport tests. What's an MRO in this context?

[elferoz777]

Multi-resistant organisms (MROs) are bacteria that are resistant to a number of different antibiotics.

Over medicating creates them.

As was pointed out before, I agree that not medicating birds is just as bad...I am only just beginning to introduce some medications to my birds now (moxidectin for the goulds).

[GregH]

From my understanding MROs have a greater chance of arising when they are under constant selection pressure. I'm not sure if it's still allowed but poultry meat growers used to give birds antibiotics in the guise of "growth promotants" in their feed. Certainly the birds did grow faster when antibiotics were fed to them and given that they are cheap it is economic to do so. The scale of this practice was many orders of magnitude greater than anything going on in backyard aviculture (and maybe still is?) but it's not a responsible of antibiotics given how frequently plasmids and other genetic information is exchanged by bacteria. As a general prophylaxis the feeding of antibiotics, even if they alternate them or simultaneously use different acting ones, is an accident waiting to happen. Bacteria proliferate and mutate readily and pass characters onto even unrelated bacterial linages some of which may be pathogenic to birds or humans. Composting contaminated litter won't prevent this happening and sterilizing everything is too expensive and even if the end product of the poultry meat industry is fairly sterile in Australia my experience in Asia has shown me just why the Chinese are so scared of diseases in poultry chain.

So while aviculturists aren't contributing much to this threat I believe we shouldn't be complacent. Medicate only when necessary and reduce as much as possible any contact of your birds from sources of infection like wild birds so roofing an aviary is a great start. Of course the counter argument is that you create "soft" birds but mother nature isn't the anthropomorphised kind loving mother we would like her to be she is ruthless. Natural selection changes the proportions of genes quite dramatically if the selection pressure is high enough and it usually does this in the case of infectious diseases by killing non-resistant genotypes. As an analogy if you have 100000000000 (ie. 10^11) of one species of bacterial cells in a kilogram of of soil and you introduce antibiotics which kill 99.999% of all the bacteria then ONE MILLION will survive! So now the soil only contains 10^6 bacteria but you've wiped out the competition and so the resistant ones remaining are free to proliferate. In the case of an avian disease causing organism replace 1 kg of soil with 1 kg of finches and you've got a disaster. A kilogram of finches is about 36 pairs and 72 individuals is a long way from the 10^11 bacteria in the kilo of soil. If the disease causes 50% mortality and amongst the 36 birds that die are the last remaining green strawbs, your new blue-face Gouldian mutation or best breeding pair of bluecaps or your new red-eared firetails then you and Australian Aviculture are. From my perspective even if you don't go to the worst case scenario a fully roofed aviary brings a piece of mind that the "natural" open aviary can not deliver.