How to raise Backyard Chickens: [CHICKENS-101] Infectious disease question

Hi all,

I haven't been active on this group for some time, but am wondering if anyone has any advice for our dilemma. We live in the outskirts of a city and have 10 chickens. Five are about 7 years and not laying much, one is a 1 year old rooster and the other four are young hens still laying. During the summer we almost lost the flock. We had a poultry vet come out and test the birds. The results came back positive for mycoplasma gallisepticum and mycoplasma synovi. We gave them Tylan and they all recovered. The vet stated that they would always be carriers. We considered culling them or at least some of them at the time, but they are kind of pets so didn't do it when they all recovered well.

Now we are moving to some acreage in a month and a half if all the inspections check out. So we are faced with either culling all the chickens and starting fresh or moving our chickens knowing that they are carriers of these diseases. My question is if we do move our chickens how likely would any new chickens be to become affected with these diseases? Obviously we can not let any chickens out of the flock to infect others, but if we could keep all the chickens healthy, perhaps we could avoid killing our current flock. I did read that stress could bring on the disease again, so they could develop it again with the stress of the move maybe.

Thoughts anyone? Anyone have experience with this? We are not really wanting to cull all the chickens, but would like to get some more info.

Thanks,

Marit in Oregon

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