Although I’ve conducted veterinary research under ACUC-approved research protocols from the UW-Madison vet school, I am not a veterinarian, and am not giving medical advice. I am sharing what I have used for my personal livestock, and for our research animals under the supervision of a veterinarian. Please seek medical advice from a veterinarian.
Using eggs to treat causes of scours is an old but effective practice that was commonly used by dairy farmers before modern coccidiostats and antibiotics were available, and this practice continues to be used by some organic farms today. It works because chickens create antibodies against pathogens in their environment, and pass this maternal immunity to their chicks by deposition of those antibodies in the yolks of their eggs. The antibodies are against pathogens that don’t affect chickens, plus those that do. Thus, the yolks are customized antimicrobials for the farm system where the chickens live. Scouring dairy calves are treated with the eggs from hens that live with the calves, and dosed by tossing 1-2 whole eggs with the shell in the mouth, closing the mouth to break the shell and letting the calf swallow it. This is repeated daily until the scouring is managed.
For goats, and my doctoral research, I mixed yolks with molasses and gave the goats a syringe of sweet raw egg daily. After a couple days, they were reaching for the dose.
If I was dosing my own goats, I would start with 1cc of egg yolk mixed with 1/2 cc molasses and 2 cc water, dosed daily to a scouring kid, for as long as the kid is scouring. In my experience, an effective dose usually stops the scouring in about 2 days time. I’ve used this on goat kids, lambs and foals. I would increase the dose if I didn’t see a reduction in scouring in that timeframe.
For a more detailed description, please read the following:
For dosing, as part of my PhD research, we gave calves 1100 mg/head/d of antibody to IL-10 (12-14 week old, ~260 lbs/hd). The problem with equating that to volume of farm eggs is that we can’t test farm eggs for antibody content against coccidia, like we could for the study, because in the study I ordered the synthesis of a protein, which I mixed into a vaccine and gave that vaccine to the chickens laying the eggs. With that protein, I could make an ELISA assay to quantify the amount of antibody in each gram of egg yolk, for our dosing experiments. Since we don’t know exactly what part of the coccidia the chickens are making antibodies against (we don’t know the specific protein), it would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to make an ELISA assay to quantify the farm egg content.
Organic farmers give scouring calves 2 yolks, of 15 grams each (they give the whole egg, shell and all, but the antibodies are in the yolks). A 15 lb goat kid is (15/260) 5.78% of a calf, and if the same dose was given to the kid, it would be 0.867 grams (0.867 ml if drawn up into a syringe). The problem with this dosing strategy is that we have no idea how much antibody is in the eggs of the organic farmers, and no idea if it’s the same amount as your farm’s eggs.
In these situations, what I do is give a dose and see if it has an effect. You would do this by doing a quantitative fecal egg count before dosing, and again in a couple days after you started dosing to see if there was a reduction in coccidia, cryptosporidium, and other organisms in the GI system. Keep track of the amount of egg yolk given, the initial coccidia count, and the post-treatment coccidia count.
If all the farm conditions remain the same (same amount of scouring kid poo that the same number of chickens are scratching through, same weather conditions, etc), then you’ll likely have eggs with the same antibody content being produced, and the dose would be the same for each egg. Farm conditions are never constant, so we have to do our best and guess.
It also takes 2 weeks of chicken exposure to a pathogen for the antibodies against that pathogen to rise to a high or therapeutic level in the yolks of the hen. See my PhD research poster on egg antibody production. So you’d want to be sure to collect eggs from hens that have had enough exposure time to have high antibody content in their eggs. The antibody titer remains high for a few weeks, and then slowly declines over a couple months if ongoing exposure is not maintained. It’s easy to maintain chicken exposure by letting the hens live with the kids, lambs, foals, calves, etc. that are scouring.
Egg yolks can be frozen to be saved for later use when conditions and exposure to pathogens is right for collection. From Dr Mark Cook’s research, freezing and defrosting a few times does not significantly decrease the effectiveness of the yolk antibodies against coccidia. From my research, I’d mix molasses and water (measured amounts so you know what proportion is yolk) into the yolks before freezing, since defrosting frozen yolks, or yolks plus water creates a custard and is very hard to pull up into a dosing syringe. The yolk/molasses/water mixture remains more fluid and can be drawn up into 3 cc syringes and frozen in easy-dosing amounts. I’d defrost and dose orally. For my research, we stored the yolks for multiple years and didn’t have problems maintaining antibody titers following defrosting. Another student on the same project experimented with dehydrating the egg yolks. The antibody titer remained high with freeze-dried yolk. Storage in an air-tight container was important to reduce oxidation of the lipids.
Here’s a publication showing how egg yolk antibodies control coccidia in layer hens.
Here’s a publication looking at egg yolk antibodies against spike protein.