Dynamics of Marek�s disease in poultry industry

Abstract

Marek�s Disease (MD) is a highly contagious disease of poultry birds and readily spread from one bird to another. The MD Virus (MDV) has the tendency to survive in the litter for long periods of time and yet retaining its pathogenicity, thus creating outbreak at any point of time and causing huge losses to the poultry farmers. This property of MDV makes it utmost important to understand the disease dynamics of MD in the form of its epidemiology information allied to prevalence, outbreaks, morbidity, mortality and surveillance. Commercial poultry farming is totally based on the economic considerations and hence the mortality leads to huge economic losses, thus studying economic impact is also concerned with the dynamics of disease. The dynamism in serotypes of the virus makes the vaccines ineffective and leads to the frequent outbreak of disease. Therefore, the biological and molecular identification of the changing serotypes may lead to the effective control of the disease which will lead to economic stability among poultry farmers.