“The Battle of the Spouses” - Profiles on Farmers using KUKUSTAR

Mbarak and Grace are examples of spouses in different households that took a chance and vaccinated their birds with the KUKUSTAR Newcastle Disease (ND) vaccine against the wishes of their other halves. As a result of their ambition, Mbarak and Grace were both forced by their spouses to separate their birds from their partners’ because they did not trust the vaccine and wanted to see the results first before engaging in the practice. The result was the same in both households. 

In the case of Mbarak, he separated his birds because his wife did not want hers vaccinated. Eventually, an ND outbreak found its way into their home and his chickens survived, while all his wife’s birds died. Since then, Mbarak’s wife has embraced the importance of vaccination and now also vaccinates her poultry with KUKUSTAR. 

For Grace, her situation was a little bit different. She was discouraged from vaccinating her chickens by both her husband and neighbors who claimed that using KUKUSTAR would kill her birds. However, despite the warnings, Grace still chose to vaccinate her birds. As expected, during an outbreak of the disease, her birds survived while both her husband’s and her neighbors’ poultry perished. After witnessing her success, both her spouse and her neighbors soon followed suit and vaccinated their birds. 

One neighbor, however, still believed that the vaccine was dangerous. He claimed that the vaccine, which is administered through an eye drop, destroyed the eye of his hen and made her blind. Grace told him that she had never had that experience, so she advised him to only vaccinate the newborn chicks and not the hen. When the next ND outbreak hit their households, the disease killed the hen but the chicks survived because they had all received the vaccine.  Since then, he too vaccinates his birds with KUKUSTAR.

Like many other couples and families, there is often a division in households when it comes to the introduction of new animal-health products to their poultry. Many farmers have had negative experiences, especially with vaccines. This is because the products are often inadequate, there is insufficient education about vaccines, and/or because farmers fail to understand the difference between vaccines, which prevent and protect from disease, and medicine, which treats sick birds. The vaccination of sick birds and the misguided idea that a vaccine can cure their birds has left them with misconceptions and skepticism about buying products related to the health of their poultry.