The good news is there are quite a few ways to treat this shell disease, but the first thing you must to is check your water quality. If you don't have a reasonable quality test kit for ammonia, nitrite and nitrate I strongly suggest you get one. You can treat this disease and then put the crayfish back in the same water and have the same issue again and again.
Lets just dispel a few myths while we are getting down to it:
Is it contagious? The answer, from what I have seen is no, even if another crayfish eats the dead one. Remember it is a bacteria infecting the shell of the crayfish, it does not jump from host to host it is not a pathogen. This also means it can not be transfered to fish and other crustaceans sharing the same tank.
I have lots of calcium carbonate, will this prevent shell disease? The answer is not at all, as the opportunistic bacteria are just that, opportunistic and regardless if your calcium hardness is high and your crayfish is injured or stressed, it will get shell disease. To what extend depends on you and your water management.
Can I treat shell disease with Melafix? For very minor injuries like the crayfish antenna in my earlier example, yes but it will not cure it. Melafix is an extremely mild anti-bacterial treatment that borders on useless which will only minimize the damage caused by the bacteria until the crayfish next moults. In severe cases, such as the photos above Melafix will do absolutely nothing at all.
Will water changes help at all? Nope, you can not dilute bacteria. That said, you may need water changes to correct your water quality should the testing recommended earlier, be less than desirable. Water chemistry changes will further stress the crayfish, if stress is the primary cause for the shell disease. First test your water in the tank and then decide if a water change is needed from those results.
Is an itchy bum a sign of worms? Yep it more than likely is.
Now after all that, lets get on with the cure: There are none.... Just jokes
There are several methods but I will give you the easiest one. Dip your crayfish in sea water for ten minutes every three days. That was easy huh? What I mean is the following:
Grab a set of scales and measure out 35grams of salt
If you don't have micro scales a good teaspoon is around 4.7grams, so 7 nice teaspoons will do.
I don't mind what salt you use, personally I prefer pool salt.
Throw that in 250ml of boiling water and stir in until dissolved.
Then take 750ml of water from your crayfish mates tank put it in a 4litre ice cream container or something similar with high sides.
Add the dissolved salt solution to it and stir again.
Drop an airstone to keep the water nice an aerated.
Set up an alarm clock to 10 in the future.
Drop your crayfish in and make sure it can not escape.
Go do some maintenance on the tank.
Come back and remove when the alarm goes off.
Repeat every 3 days as needed until next moult or lesions are "bleached out".
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