Coligranulomatosis (Hjärre and Wramby’s disease) reconsidered

Abstract

Coligranulomatosis (Hjärre and Wramby's disease) is considered to be a disease of chickens, turkeys and partridges that occurs sporadically in individual, adult birds. Therefore, the condition is not of economic importance, but is of interest due to the similarity of its lesions to those of tuberculosis. In a number of cases the disease could be reproduced by inoculation via artificial routes of granuloma homogenate or Escherichia coli bacteria isolated from the lesions. Oral inoculations always failed. Occasionally, also serious outbreaks of granuloma disease have been reported in chickens, turkeys and quails. E. coli bacteria were either not isolated or isolated, but the disease could not be reproduced with the isolates, which means that the essence of Koch's postulates was not fulfilled. Also other evidence of causality was not presented. Therefore, these disease cases might have been wrongly diagnosed as coligranulomatosis. Instead they may have been caused by Tetratrichomonas gallinarum, a parasite, which has the ability to induce severe granulomatosis in chicken flocks as has been shown recently. It is concluded that whenever severe granuloma disease is observed in poultry flocks at a large scale and is thus economically relevant, T. gallinarum should be included and rank high in the list of differential diagnoses.

Do we really need to reconsider coligranulomatosis (Hjärre and Wramby’s disease) in poultry?

“…We were very interested to read the Guest Editorial "Coligranulomatosis (Hjärre and Wramby's disease) reconsidered" by Landman & van Eck (2017) in Avian Pathology 46, 237-241. The authors conclude that the aetiology of coligranulomatosis in some published cases in chickens, turkeys and quails should be reconsidered due to the lack of successful reproduction, which does not satisfy the requirements of Koch's postulates.…”

Pathomorphological and molecular investigations in naturally infected Chukar partridges (Alectoris Chukar) with Histomonas meleagridis and Tetratrichomonas gallinarum

“…Researchers reported that the macroscopic lesions observed in such cases contributed to the etiological diagnosis (Allen 1941, Supartika et al 2006. It has been reported that avian tuberculosis has caseified nodules that tend to spread to the spleen and bone marrow (Landman & van Eck 2017, Yavuz et al 2021). In the present study, nodules with caseified foci were not observed in the bone marrow, spleen, and liver, and it was partially differentiated from tuberculosis in macroscopic examination.…”

Tetratrichomonas gallinarum granuloma disease in a flock of free range layers

“…1977). In retrospective, likely the disease was caused by T. gallinarum (Landman and Van Eck 2017a).…”