chicken leg disease?

A friend of mine has just send me these photos and would love to know what's wrong with her chicken.

Any ideas?









I don't have much detail yet, but she says the blisters are quite recent and seem to be full of fluid. The scalyness has been there for a while longer, but not sure how long.

Any ideas or suggestions welcome.

It looks to me like a very bad case of bumble foot combined with scaly mite.

In the past, my sister was able to cure cases of bumble foot by coating the foot (after careful washing with soap and water) in Desenex cream or other anti-fungal cream and wrapping in bandages. She used gauze and masking tape as a bandage. The chickens didn't tend to try to remove it. Bandages changed and cream reapplied until the infection went away. A problem as severe as the one pictured seems to indicate a lack of general health - poor diet maybe - and/or unhealthy housing conditions.

Heavy scalyness is usually due to mites. This is really easy to fix in chickens by simply providing them with a dust bath of diatomaceous earth. I use a large litter box filled with a few inches of the DE.

But that wouldn't cause the ulcerations.

Agree with the bumble foot, the blistering I've never seen associated with it.

Scaly leg cure = smother the leg with vaseline worked into the scales and repeat for a week

Bumble foot I'd try tea tree oil repeated regularly for a week or two

The Blisters are more worrying - if they are result of severe skin infection they'll be full of bacteria and the bird has to be isolated

Frankly I think I would euthanise this bird and concentrate on the rest of the flock - deep clean the pen and run and treat all scaly leg etc

Good luck with it
Roger

Unfortunately, I agree with you about the euthanasia Roger - this has gone too far and the poor bird may never recover without antibiotics and an awful lot of TLC.

Burra Maluca, if your friend only has a few chickens and plenty of time then she can cure both of these problems as mentioned above but something has gone badly wrong with the conditions the chicken has been kept in and if it were me I'd spend my time making sure the birds' housing and exercise yard are dry, big enough and with lots of straw or something to soak up the birds' droppings.

OK, I've been in touch again and passed the info on. Apparently they bought the chickens at a local market and have already lost half of them with some sort of parasite infection - it sounded like lice from the description. And since the photos above were taken, those blisters have started to burst so it doesn't sound too hopeful for poor Pui-Pui.

Thanks for the advice everyone, and I'll let you all know the outcome. Hopefully she can save some of them and prevent any future chickens developing the same problems.

I know several old-timers that swear scaly leg can be cured by spraying with WD-40.

What your friend's birds have is not just a case of simple scaly leg. It looks extremely serious.