Table 1.
Incidence and severity of NE in different treatments.
| Group | N | NE case | Frequency |
Lesion score (Mean ± SD) | Incidence | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Score 2 | Score 3 | Score 4 | |||||
| Noninfected | 21 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.71 ± 0.46b | 0.00%b |
| Eimeria+CP | 19 | 5 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 1.57 ± 1.01a | 26.32%a |
| Eimeria+CP+AM | 20 | 7 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 1.45 ± 0.67a | 35.00%a |
| Eimeria+AM | 21 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 ± 0b | 0.00%b |
| Eimeria | 21 | 0 | - | - | - | - | 0.00%b |
Three chicks were dead and identified as early mortality after necropsy in Eimeria+CP (n = 2) and Eimeria+CP+AM (n = 1) groups.
Lesion score ≥ 2 was NE positive.
Lesion scores: 0 (no gross lesions), 1 (congested intestinal mucosa), 2 (small focal necrosis or ulceration; 1 to 5 foci), 3 (focal necrosis or ulceration; 6 to 15 foci), and 4 (focal necrosis or ulceration; 16 or more foci).
Unitary treatment of Eimeria spp. caused pale mucus membrane in all segments of small intestines. The scoring was not conducted on the Eimeria group to avoid the bias of observations and comparisons.
The lesion score was transformed to ranked data and then analyzed by Tukey's test. The difference in NE frequency was evaluated by Chi-square or Fisher exact tests.
A different superscript (a,b) in the same column means significantly different (P ≤ 0.05).