title: Anticoccidial effects of herbal extracts on Eimeria tenella infection in broiler chickens: in vitro and in vivo study.
abstract: Safe alternative anticoccidial drug to chemical feed additives are herbal extracts, because they don't results to tissue residue and drug resistance. In order to evaluate the effects of herbal extracts to control avian coccidiosis, 180 one-day-old broiler chickens were randomly divided into nine equal groups, as follows: (1) Biarum bovei (2) Nectaroscordum tripedale( 3) Dorema aucheri (4) Cichorium intybus (5) Prangos ferulaceae (6) diclazuril (7) Artemisia absinthium (8) infected control (9) uninfected control (each contains two groups). Administration of herbal extracts and supplementation of diclazuril was began 2 days before challenge and lasted for the duration of the experiment. The chicks of all the groups except uninfected control group were inoculated orally with sporulated oocysts (3 × 10(3) oocysts of Eimeria tenella) on the day 22 of age. The criteria employed were: body weight, feed conversion ratio, blood in feces, survival rate, lesion scoring, number of oocyst output per gram feces and histopathological changes. For histopathological evaluation, on day 12 post inoculation three birds from each group were randomly selected and humanly sacrificed. N. tripedale and diclazuril revealed better results in terms of growth performance, lesion score, extent of bloody diarrhea and oocyst count as compared to other herbal extracts. The increase in the severity of lesions was observed in groups of D. aucheri, A. absinthium, B. bovei, P. ferulaceae, C. intybus, diclazuril and N. tripedale, respectively. In conclusion, the current study showed that herbal extracts were effective in control of coccidiosis caused by the E. tenella infection.
authors.affiliation: Department of Animal Sciences, College of Agriculture, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, Iran.
authors.forename: Hasan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Habibi
authors.affiliation: Avian Diseases Research Center, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
authors.forename: Sobhan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Firouzi
authors.affiliation: Avian Diseases Research Center, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
authors.forename: Hasan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Nili
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathobiology, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
authors.forename: Mostafa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Razavi
authors.affiliation: Avian Diseases Research Center, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
authors.forename: Seyedeh Leili
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Asadi
authors.affiliation: Avian Diseases Research Center, School of Veterinary Medicine, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
authors.forename: Sajad
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Daneshi
keywords: Anticoccidial; Broiler chicken; Coccidiosis; Herbal extract