First of all, one of the main and difficult culprit organisms involved is Staph aureus. It is an anaerobic bacteria which thrives in the absence of oxygen, such as in an internal wound such as the foot. Its colony also involves usually a hard plug of tissue, which must usually be removed in order for eradication to occur, antibiotics won't just magically cure it unless you get the mass of infection out. In bumblefoot you usually see a black appearing scabby surface, underneath that is a sort of dense, hard waxy plug, sometimes there is a pussy abcess behind that but sometimes not. Other bacteria can be involved, pseudomanas spp, and others, but Staph is usually the main and difficult to cure part of the problem. Staph is sort of always out there and on many of our skin, in soils, but then a wound gives it a place to grow, often in our chooks this is on the base of their feet.
You often read to lance, to me this is not effective, more painful for the bird, and more risky because you put infection possibly into the bloodstream, and make a more complicated wound. What I came across is a method to actually pull out the plug of Staph.
You need a very thick pad of sterile cotton gauze, absolutely drenched with Bactine, which is benzalkonium chloride. You wash the chook's foot with soap and water on a facecloth and try to rub off the black superficial surface scab. Then you put that soaked gauze on the bottom of the foot where the "bumble" is, and wrap it up very well with vetrap. So the bactine will really soak into the nearby tissues around the epicenter of the bumble. Bactine is sort of irritating, very slightly "caustic", so just be warned about that, I really try to center it on the infected area, but it does need to be soaking. If the chicken had a foot that was all cut up I'd think twice, but generally the rest of the foot seems to tolerate the treatment. Then you leave it for the right amount of time - I have found this to be somewhere just over an hour, when I've left it longer I sort of missed the window and it didn't work and I had to re-soak.
After this approximate generous hour, you take a sterile scalpel blade, and you gently work away the infected mass away at the edges. Kind of like "picking" a scab but carefully in away at all edges. You go all the way around the "bumble", and pull it toward the center away from the edges as much as you can, being careful to get all of it from the very edge of where the chicken's good tissue begins, and if the bumble is deep, try to peel away from the edges fairly deeply too. When you have the whole thing sort of lifted away from the edge and toward the center, you grab the central mass as deeply as you can with sterile tweezers, and you slowly but firmly pull the whole thing out. In one case, it was sort of like pulling the whole foot pad inside out, it pulled out very deeply, and cleanly. If there is any pus, when you remove the "plug" of staph, you should make it possible for the pus to come out.
Now you clean out the hole and area with your preferred strong antiseptic, (I also wash and sterilize down the whole foot with betadine) get some antibiotic stuff in there, and re-bandage. I like to keep the treated chook in a nice area on clean soft bedding, usually scrap towels which can become a full time job to keep clean. You can vetrap and bandage up the foot, but you will need to change this bandage often, as you can cause other skin abrasions between the toes etc if the vetrap is left on too long. You will need to keep other bacteria out of there until the wound is healed.
Now as for antibiotics, this is my two cents. For antibiotic cream for the surface of the wound, IMO it is worth it to get some Mupiricin which is Bactroban from a vet, as that is extremely effective on Staph for the local antibiotic cream. Chlorhexidine as the "cleaner" disinfectant you use is also one of top effectiveness on staph, alhthough one vet I saw assured me the Betadine is also fine. IMO chickens will also need a systemic (ie oral or injectible) antibiotic to cure this usually, and of sufficient duration of treatment. If your chicken is very ill from the Staph, maybe Pen G is a good first place, it seems to knock it down quickly, and with minimum stress for the chicken to process the antibiotic, and minimum effect on the GI of the chicken. The first chicken I found bumblefoot in was very ill, refusing egg yolk (imagine that!), and the PenG shot helped her dramatically within 24 hours. The other good first place IMO is erythromycin, in strong enough dosage to be effective, but erythromycin especially oral erythromycin is hard on the GI. The thing about the PenG according to one vet I saw is that it may or not completely eradicate the staph, as after a week or 10 days it MIGHT show some resistance. Now in bumblefoot in my understanding, one mistake is to treat it too short. I don't think there's any hope of a 3-5 day course of anything completely eradicating a complicated case of bumblefoot. Baytril can also be used. I was tempted and it seemed to work with two chooks, to start with a good course of pen G (or erythromycin), then follow with a course of Baytril to clean everything up after. Lincomycin injectible can also be used (one chicken of mine almost died because the vet gave too strong a dose). I also bought clindamycin from one vet, but was scared to administer it because of lack of information out there on birdies. (though I did put some clindamycin powder in one chicken's bumblefoot hole after removing the plug; clindamycin is supposed to be exceptional for certain anaerobes).
Now lots of us do epsom salts soaking, whick can be a very good thing, EXCEPT WHEN YOU USE BAYTRIL IMO. When Baytril binds to calcium or magnesium it becomes ineffective. So if you are dosing with baytril then soaking the wound in magnesium sulphate to me you are negating the antibiotic right there at the wound site. Similar thing to watch out for to not counteract your antibiotics is that the macrolide antibiotic such as erythromycin, clindamycin, lincomycin all diminish each others effectivness so don't combine those.
If you do use Baytril, one of the nice things about it (and lincomycin is like this as well), is that the injectible antibiotic as it comes out of the bottle is in the active form, so you can squirt some additionaly antibiotic right in the wound site and it's ready to go to work on the spot. Pen G apparently needs to be metabolized to be converted into the active form by the body so it needs to all be injected in the breast muscle. If you don't want to inject, erythromycin and Baytril are available in oral forms.
The bactine soak can and should be repeated a second time to get out any stuff left over after a few days. It may have formed a second scab at the wound site, and it's great to also get that off and out.
With good aftercare and healing, this method has totally cured five of my chickens of bumblefoot. With no reoccurrence. All happy healthy, etc. It's been about a year for most of them since they had it, so so far so good.
If you can't get the hard plug of staph out by the above method or your chosen method, then I would think you're likely looking at vet surgery. You will need a vet anyway to access some of the antibiotics above, so it may be a good idea to consult a vet or take the chicken in for an office visit to access prescription medications. It is also a good idea to see what you're dealing with in terms of how advanced the infection is to have a good feel of the foot to see how deep and how hard the infected mass is.
Now bumblefoot is easier to cure the earlier you spot it, so it is a good idea to go chook by chook and check all their feets every now and again. If you have one chook with bumblefoot, I would say immediately do an inspection of all their feet to see if you find any others. Any warm/hot spots, any black scabs and swollen areas, etc.
Good Luck, hope this is helpful.
You often read to lance, to me this is not effective, more painful for the bird, and more risky because you put infection possibly into the bloodstream, and make a more complicated wound. What I came across is a method to actually pull out the plug of Staph.
You need a very thick pad of sterile cotton gauze, absolutely drenched with Bactine, which is benzalkonium chloride. You wash the chook's foot with soap and water on a facecloth and try to rub off the black superficial surface scab. Then you put that soaked gauze on the bottom of the foot where the "bumble" is, and wrap it up very well with vetrap. So the bactine will really soak into the nearby tissues around the epicenter of the bumble. Bactine is sort of irritating, very slightly "caustic", so just be warned about that, I really try to center it on the infected area, but it does need to be soaking. If the chicken had a foot that was all cut up I'd think twice, but generally the rest of the foot seems to tolerate the treatment. Then you leave it for the right amount of time - I have found this to be somewhere just over an hour, when I've left it longer I sort of missed the window and it didn't work and I had to re-soak.
After this approximate generous hour, you take a sterile scalpel blade, and you gently work away the infected mass away at the edges. Kind of like "picking" a scab but carefully in away at all edges. You go all the way around the "bumble", and pull it toward the center away from the edges as much as you can, being careful to get all of it from the very edge of where the chicken's good tissue begins, and if the bumble is deep, try to peel away from the edges fairly deeply too. When you have the whole thing sort of lifted away from the edge and toward the center, you grab the central mass as deeply as you can with sterile tweezers, and you slowly but firmly pull the whole thing out. In one case, it was sort of like pulling the whole foot pad inside out, it pulled out very deeply, and cleanly. If there is any pus, when you remove the "plug" of staph, you should make it possible for the pus to come out.
Now you clean out the hole and area with your preferred strong antiseptic, (I also wash and sterilize down the whole foot with betadine) get some antibiotic stuff in there, and re-bandage. I like to keep the treated chook in a nice area on clean soft bedding, usually scrap towels which can become a full time job to keep clean. You can vetrap and bandage up the foot, but you will need to change this bandage often, as you can cause other skin abrasions between the toes etc if the vetrap is left on too long. You will need to keep other bacteria out of there until the wound is healed.
Now as for antibiotics, this is my two cents. For antibiotic cream for the surface of the wound, IMO it is worth it to get some Mupiricin which is Bactroban from a vet, as that is extremely effective on Staph for the local antibiotic cream. Chlorhexidine as the "cleaner" disinfectant you use is also one of top effectiveness on staph, alhthough one vet I saw assured me the Betadine is also fine. IMO chickens will also need a systemic (ie oral or injectible) antibiotic to cure this usually, and of sufficient duration of treatment. If your chicken is very ill from the Staph, maybe Pen G is a good first place, it seems to knock it down quickly, and with minimum stress for the chicken to process the antibiotic, and minimum effect on the GI of the chicken. The first chicken I found bumblefoot in was very ill, refusing egg yolk (imagine that!), and the PenG shot helped her dramatically within 24 hours. The other good first place IMO is erythromycin, in strong enough dosage to be effective, but erythromycin especially oral erythromycin is hard on the GI. The thing about the PenG according to one vet I saw is that it may or not completely eradicate the staph, as after a week or 10 days it MIGHT show some resistance. Now in bumblefoot in my understanding, one mistake is to treat it too short. I don't think there's any hope of a 3-5 day course of anything completely eradicating a complicated case of bumblefoot. Baytril can also be used. I was tempted and it seemed to work with two chooks, to start with a good course of pen G (or erythromycin), then follow with a course of Baytril to clean everything up after. Lincomycin injectible can also be used (one chicken of mine almost died because the vet gave too strong a dose). I also bought clindamycin from one vet, but was scared to administer it because of lack of information out there on birdies. (though I did put some clindamycin powder in one chicken's bumblefoot hole after removing the plug; clindamycin is supposed to be exceptional for certain anaerobes).
Now lots of us do epsom salts soaking, whick can be a very good thing, EXCEPT WHEN YOU USE BAYTRIL IMO. When Baytril binds to calcium or magnesium it becomes ineffective. So if you are dosing with baytril then soaking the wound in magnesium sulphate to me you are negating the antibiotic right there at the wound site. Similar thing to watch out for to not counteract your antibiotics is that the macrolide antibiotic such as erythromycin, clindamycin, lincomycin all diminish each others effectivness so don't combine those.
If you do use Baytril, one of the nice things about it (and lincomycin is like this as well), is that the injectible antibiotic as it comes out of the bottle is in the active form, so you can squirt some additionaly antibiotic right in the wound site and it's ready to go to work on the spot. Pen G apparently needs to be metabolized to be converted into the active form by the body so it needs to all be injected in the breast muscle. If you don't want to inject, erythromycin and Baytril are available in oral forms.
The bactine soak can and should be repeated a second time to get out any stuff left over after a few days. It may have formed a second scab at the wound site, and it's great to also get that off and out.
With good aftercare and healing, this method has totally cured five of my chickens of bumblefoot. With no reoccurrence. All happy healthy, etc. It's been about a year for most of them since they had it, so so far so good.
If you can't get the hard plug of staph out by the above method or your chosen method, then I would think you're likely looking at vet surgery. You will need a vet anyway to access some of the antibiotics above, so it may be a good idea to consult a vet or take the chicken in for an office visit to access prescription medications. It is also a good idea to see what you're dealing with in terms of how advanced the infection is to have a good feel of the foot to see how deep and how hard the infected mass is.
Now bumblefoot is easier to cure the earlier you spot it, so it is a good idea to go chook by chook and check all their feets every now and again. If you have one chook with bumblefoot, I would say immediately do an inspection of all their feet to see if you find any others. Any warm/hot spots, any black scabs and swollen areas, etc.
Good Luck, hope this is helpful.
