Isolation and identification of the pathogens causing infectious proventriculitis in chicks

Seven batchssof six ten thousand egg used chicks were incubated on an egg used breeder chicks farm, Hebei province, where a disease characterized by serious leaning sign and swollen proventriculus happened in the chicks at age of 30 to 80 day. And an infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) was isolated from the proventriculus sampled from the affected chicks. SPF chicks were inoculated with the homogenate of the proventriculus from the affected chicks and the isolate of the fifth passages chick embryos, respectively. And the chicks inoculated the homogenate of the proventriculus showed clinical signs as same as the natural case but the chicks innoculated with the isolate of the fifth passages chick embryos didn't showed any lesions of swollen proventriculus. And then the serum specimens were sampled from the chicks of the tested groups for examining the antibodies related with 17 pathogens, the test result revealed that the antibody to reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV) existed in the sera from the chicks inoculated with the homogenate of the proventriculus. The preliminary test result indicated that this disease characterized by swollen proventriculus was possiblely related with infection by REV. However, the isolate of IBV wasn's able to cause any swollen proventriculus lesion of the affected chicks.