Abstract

The present research work was carried out to detect and isolate Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) from apparently healthy chickens and evaluate their role in Newcastle disease outbreak.A survey on the prevalence of Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) was conducted in six Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Benue State, Nigeria. A total of 250 cloacal and tracheal swabs were collected from apparently healthy chickens from commercial farms, Live Bird Markets (LBMs) and village households. Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) was used to detect Newcastle Disease Viruses (NDV) while viral isolation was performed using embryonated chicken eggs. The overall detection rate for ND Viruses (NDVs) was 12% (30/250). Newcastle disease viruses were detected in all sampling units with the highest viral detection of 16.1% (9/56) from chickens in LBMs. The overall NDV isolation rate was 20% (6/30), isolates were from Kwande and Makurdi LGAs with village chickens from LBMs (55.6%) recording the highest isolation rate. Chickens from LBMs, Kwande and Makurdi LGAs may serve as sources of NDVs to those in commercial farms and village households. The vaccination of village chickens should be considered as important in the control of ND in Benue State, Nigeria.

Keywords:

Chicken, live bird market, Newcastle disease virus, Nigeria, RT-PCR, village households,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.