Climatic Change and Chicken Immunity

Abstract

As the most socio-economic problems in the world, climatic change is an issue that will cause most damaging for those least able to adapt. But nobody is immune to climatic change—making it a truly global problem. Climate change affirm that the pollution of our atmosphere could result in extreme weather events. With intensify in global temperatures, processes such as desertification are transforming once thriving areas into arid environments. Since warm air is capable of stocking huge quantities of water, due to higher evaporation rates, storms and other extreme climate events have become more frequent and extremist. The challenges posed by climatic change fit broadly into one of two categories: loss of productivity or increasing costs. Stress is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand, whereas stressor can be defined as “an agent that produces stress at any time”. Therefore, stress represents the reaction of the animal organism to stimuli that disturb its normal physiological equilibrium or homeostasis, due to the mess up of energy and water balances through the evaporative heat loss mechanism. Concerning the effects of heat stress on chickens, the following findings were reported: (1) energizing glucocorticoid-dependent mechanisms and increasing the corticosterone serum levels (2) decreases in the feed consumption, growth rates, the intestinal villi heights, and the wet and dry weights of jejunum, the total white blood cell count; (3) decreases in the number of peripheral blood lymphocytes and induction of an electrolyte imbalance; (4) decreases in the blood lymphocytes and spleen weight; (5) decreases in macrophage activity and (6) decreases in CD4+ and CD8+ lymphocytes and decreases the antibody production against sheep red blood cells (SRBC).