Inclusion body hepatitis (IBH) infections may not offer clear-cut clinical symptoms, but there are on-farm diagnostic measures that can yield early warnings. The good news is it’s fairly easy to train production personnel to recognize suspect IBH cases and determine how to proceed.

The first consideration in monitoring IBH is the location of the flock. If IBH is a problem in the geographic region, or if a farm has a record of repeat IBH incidences, the personnel need to keep a watchful eye.

An early sign of IBH in a broiler house is a sudden increase in mortality rates. “It’s always a good exercise to look at daily mortality in every single, at-risk flock and in flocks affected by IBH,” said Guillermo Zavala, DVM, PhD, Avian Health International. “When there’s an IBH outbreak in the absence of bronchitis or other obvious diseases, mortality easily goes above 0.1% per day.”

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