When reviewing figures from the last fiscal year, pathologist Dr. Francisco Uzal said he has seen something new in the California racing fatality numbers.
Uzal is in charge of the necropsy program at the University of California, which examines any horse who dies on a state-sanctioned racetrack there. He gave a report on the current year's figures from his program at a regularly-scheduled meeting of the California Horse Racing Board on Dec. 14. Uzal gave figures for the last fiscal year and the current one. In California, the fiscal year runs from July to June.
Across all breeds in the current fiscal year so far, there have been 25 musculoskeletal fatalities and 19 non-musculoskeletal deaths. The same period in 2022 saw 11 musculoskeletal fatalities and 22 non-musculoskeletal deaths.
Uzal also noted that in the fiscal year that ran from July 2022 to June 2023, there was a change in the most common cause of death.
“Traditionally we have many more musculoskeletal than other systems but when you look at 2022-23 this changed,” Uzal told commissioners. “For the first time this past [fiscal] year we had more medical cases than musculoskeletal. This is a good thing because it means the accidents are going down.”
“Medical cases,” in this context, refers to non-orthopedic cases. That includes sudden deaths as well as colics, infections, or barn area accidents.
For the 2022-23 fiscal year, there were 69 total equine fatalities across breeds, with 29 of them musculoskeletal and 40 non-musculoskeletal.
Uzal said he believes this is because various state- and track-level reforms, as well as the increased availability of high-tech imaging modalities, has allowed officials and trainers to intervene before a horse suffers an orthopedic injury. He reiterated to commissioners that research shows 85-90% of fatal injuries occur at the site of a pre-existing injury, although that injury may be subclinical prior to the catastrophic damage.
Sudden deaths have held steady in recent years in California, and Uzal said he continues to struggle to find an explanation for them.
“We think 60% are heart-related,” he said. “We think they're probably electrical conduction issues. We thought that perhaps there's some hereditary component; we don't know that, we are speculating. We are currently studying the exercise records and we are noticing some differences. We've seen that a number of horses that die suddenly, over the last weeks before death, had been slowing down, so we think that either the trainer, the vet, or the horse itself picked up something that nobody knows what it is.”
Uzal clarified that when he says “slow down” he means the horse's workload seems to get slower and lighter. They start going shorter distances and are spending less collective time exercising in those last weeks. He has expanded the toxicology testing he has done on some sudden death cases in recent years, but hasn't found an underlying cause there. The lab does keep urine, blood, follicle, and tissue samples frozen for retesting and research as new methods come along.
“Currently there's not much more we can say,” he said regarding sudden deaths. “The numbers are more or less constant. The percentage has been going up, just because the musculoskeletal deaths are going down.”
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