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Updated: Four Barns At Laurel Under Quarantine Due To Equine Herpesvirus

Four barns at Laurel Park — Barns 1, 4, 10, and 11 — have been placed under quarantine after one horse developed neurological symptoms over the weekend and subsequently tested positive for equine herpesvirus.

According to a video conference call held Tuesday afternoon, one horse developed neurologic symptoms over the weekend and was quickly removed to the Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center in Leesburg, Va., where the horse is responding well to treatment. Test results later indicated the horse was positive for the “wild type” strain of EHV-1.

There are two closely related strains of EHV-1 that may be indicated in testing, and they're commonly called the “wild type” and the “neuropathogenic type.” Both can cause neurological symptoms and are handled basically the same way by animal health officials.

Read more about EHV-1 in this Paulick Report explainer from 2016.

Contact tracing on the horse later revealed it had potential exposures in the now-quarantined barns. Horses from those barns were not permitted to train Tuesday, but track management is working on a plan to allow them to train Wednesday morning. Those horses will not be permitted to gate school, and Maryland's equine welfare and medical director Dr. Libby Daniel indicated they would likely not be permitted to race.

The initial quarantine is expected to last 14 days, but a new positive will restart the quarantine length for the barn in which the new case is found. The 14-day period started March 8.

Dr. Michael Odian, Maryland state veterinarian, and Steve Koch, senior vice president of racing operations at The Stronach Group, emphasized that diligence by all personnel will be key to minimizing disease spread and getting the quarantine orders lifted as scheduled.

“The trick is we have to be super diligent throughout that 14 days, make sure there is no cross contamination or exposures that cause further barns to be quarantined,” said Koch. “All horses need to be asymptomatic during that period.”

Horses can continue to enter Laurel during this time, but will not be permitted to leave. The same rules will apply at Pimlico, except that horses who leave Pimlico to run at Laurel may return to Pimlico. The two facilities are being treated as one property for the purposes of the outbreak.

Horsemen are asked to take horses' temperatures twice daily and monitor them for signs of the disease. Equine herpesvirus is a highly transmissible respiratory illness which can spread through nasal discharge or aerosol droplets. It can also be spread passively on surfaces such as human hands, shared grooming tools, and tack.

Horses that are symptomatic (those that have a fever of 102 degrees or higher or those showing neurological signs) should be tested as soon as possible. Crews have cleaned out Barn 29 on the Laurel backstretch and horsemen are encouraged to remove horses from their shedrows at the first sign of potential illness and take them to Barn 29 to reduce the amount of time the virus could be passed to horses in neighboring stalls. Horses should be tested for the virus only if they show symptoms, and will be tested twice — once when they become symptomatic, and once 72 hours later. The goal of the second test is to catch horses who may show symptoms before actually shedding enough of the virus to be picked up on the first test.

Staff working in quarantine barns should not go from quarantined areas to non-quarantined areas. They should save their work in quarantine barns for the end of the day, and leave the facility after working in those barns. Staff are encouraged to keep a change of shoes to be used only in quarantined barns, or to use pull-on rubber galoshes over existing boots. Ideally, staff should also wear coveralls over their clothes when working in a quarantined area. All equipment should be wiped down with disinfectant at the end of each work day to prevent disease transmission.

EHV-1 outbreaks have been in the headlines in the equestrian world in recent weeks. A large outbreak in Europe has frozen international competitions there, and an outbreak connected to the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Fla., saw its third suspected case over the weekend after two horses tested positive. All three horses exhibited high fevers, one nine days after leaving the Center. Odian confirmed the strain of the virus at Laurel is not the same as the strain in the European outbreak, and said he did not believe it was the same strain connected with recent positives in Florida or one in Pennsylvania.

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Webinar: Tips For How To Train When Riding Isn’t An Option

Winter weather often limits training for horses of all kinds, and although much of the country is now experiencing warmer temperatures, spring rains could continue to create headaches for equestrians.

With this challenge in mind, the Retired Racehorse Project recently hosted a webinar titled, 'How To Train When You Can't Ride' to offer tips for riders of all sports to keep horses physically and mentally engaged when the ground is icy, rain-soaked or snow-covered.

A few key takeaways:

Dr. Shannon Reed, associate professor of equine surgery at The Ohio State University and off-track Thoroughbred advocate, said that even for a horse in rehabilitation from an injury, there are ways to keep things from being monotonous. If a horse is limited to hand walking, check with your veterinarian to see if it's ok to hand walk outside rather than in the barn aisle, whether tack walking or trailer loading practice are acceptable forms of exercise. Stall-bound horses may still be able to work on vocal cues and lateral work (“Move over”) in the stall. Walking over ground poles or under saddle may also be an option for some horses.
“You should come out of six months of rehab with a better horse than what you went in with,” said Reed. “There are a whole lot of things that you can do with your horse that have nothing to do with being under saddle, which is someplace we sometimes put ourselves under pressure.”

Always check with the veterinarian when brainstorming things that could fit within the guidelines – don't ask the Facebook peanut gallery.
Hand walking, especially a brisk walk, can be a surprisingly good way to get a horse (and rider) fit. Reed recommends hand walking in whatever environment you safely can. While walking the roads of her neighborhood, Reed was able to introduce her OTTB to ditches, mailboxes, driveways, trash cans, and other items. The horse learned to stop and wait for people to pass, and to turn on the forehand when required.
Reward curiosity in your horse. It's better for a horse to encounter something new in a low-pressure, non-time sensitive situation than at a competition.
Hand walking is a safe way to begin teaching herd bound horses that they will return to their friends eventually, and that it's ok to trust and focus on the human handler despite separation anxiety. That trust will likely translate to under saddle work.
Lateral work can be done in hand with the help of a dressage whip to help direct a horse's haunches. Lateral movement from the walk is a good way to help a horse stretch and stay limber without putting stress on joints and soft tissues.
Walking through puddles is another easy lesson that doesn't require a perfect surface. Water can reflect light and movement in unexpected ways, and even if you don't plan to run your horse cross country and encounter water on a routine basis, odds are that he will encounter a puddle at some stage that must be crossed safely.
Standing and ground tying are underestimated skills. Horses, especially young or high-energy horses, need to become comfortable with some degree of boredom waiting for their class at a horse show, or waiting by a trailer. Standing by the mounting block is also a challenge for many horses, since they don't realize the significance of the block and may be used to being mounted while in motion.
Ask your local farm supply shop for old sale banners that you can add to your arena so your horse has experience with something bright that may flap in the wind.
Trailer rides don't always have to be about going somewhere for competition. Those who have a truck and trailer have the opportunity to not only haul horses to schooling shows as non-competitors to stand and watch the proceedings. They also have the chance to take horses on short errands, like running to the grocery store for 10 minutes and taking the horse back home. This will make traveling less of an “event” and keep horses relaxed about the process – especially if they have a hay net to munch on.

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A ‘Horse-on-a-Chip’? The Future Of Equine Drug Research Could Look Very Different

The research process for drug toxicology in horses has always been long, slow, and expensive. Too often, when veterinarians want to more about the way a drug behaves in horses, they find themselves relying on limited data collected from a small number of horses. That's because there is a lot of expense and regulation associated with using live animals for research of any kind, even a simple drug administration study aimed at determining how quickly horses' bodies metabolize a therapeutic substance. It's also expensive for universities to maintain horse research herds of significant size year after year, awaiting their use in a short study.

A research group at the Gluck Equine Research Center is hopeful they have a solution that will make it quicker and easier for scientists to understand how drugs behave in horses, and it sounds like something out of a sci-fi drama: microscopic equine organ systems.

It's no longer science fiction. Dr. Carrie Shaffer said researchers aren't reconstructing full-size organs, but rather are using defined layers of cells that mirror what you'd find in an equine kidney, liver, lung, or intestine. The cells come from tissue-specific stem cells collected from a Thoroughbred foal that had to be euthanized due to an unrelated structural deformity. Stem cells have the ability to become any kind of differentiated cell upon command, so the researchers are able to direct the cells to form a particular organ tissue.

“We can prove, using a variety of different methods, that our equine microscopic organ systems are stem-cell derived and have the same characteristics and architecture as the corresponding tissue in the horse.”

These microscopic organ systems are grown in clear, plastic microfluidic chips that are about the size of a AA battery. In human medicine, similar microfluidic chips have been developed to mimic the human liver, lung, intestine, kidney, and blood/brain barrier and are used to study various aspects of cell biology and tissue responses to therapeutics.

The metabolism of a drug isn't dependent on the full-size physical structure of an equine liver or kidney, according to Shaffer – it's how the cells of those organs interact with drugs they encounter as the substance passes through an animal's bloodstream and into the organ tissue. Shaffer is able to grow specific liver cells in one channel of the microfluidic chip while creating artificial blood vessels and blood-like fluid flow on the opposite channel of the chip. This simulates a continuous blood supply interfaced with the mucous membranes that are normally found in the body. The blood flow can go in only one direction, which also mimics the horse's body, where veins and arteries carry blood through an organ in only one direction at a time.

“In the case of the lung chip and the intestine chip, we can also introduce relevant biomechanical forces that simulate complex biological processes,” she said. “We can introduce physical stresses into the chip that mimic breathing and lung inflation, or recreate defined patterns of stretch across the intestine chip that simulate the wave-like pattern of nutrients and waste products moving along the equine intestinal system.”

These forces have been shown to direct gene expression in the cells, which create small, but critical, changes that make the microfluidic chips behave more like the cells found in a live animal.

Previous iterations of this technology didn't include biomechanical forces like stretch, so the tissue wasn't as true to that in a horse's body. Additionally, previous tissue culture systems did not allow for directional fluid flow, but rather exposed a single type of liver or kidney cell to static fluid containing a drug at a fixed concentration. That's not how real kidneys and livers actually work, said Shaffer – the organs contain multiple cell types that are exposed to blood flowing at a relatively high rate. Therapeutics within the bloodstream pass through various organ systems within seconds, and carry metabolized drug away from one organ system for delivery to another.

“Under normal drug testing conditions, we are able to analyze a blood sample from a horse after a drug is administered, but we cannot tell in that blood sample where the drug metabolism occurred,” she said. “We don't know whether the drug was liver-metabolized, intestinal-metabolized, or metabolized in the lung. Our horse-on-a-chip microfluidic technology allows us to isolate exactly where drug metabolism occurs within the horse.”

Some drugs metabolize at different rates in different organs, and organs probably take turns at metabolizing a drug but there's currently no way to know in what order metabolism occurs for a given therapeutic. That information could be useful because some drugs linger longer in the body than expected, and scientists often don't know where the hold-up is.

Shaffer said her lab has performed only a handful of studies with the technology because it's so new. So far, the team has pulsed a drug through an equine lung-chip and a liver-chip for sample collection from the apparatus at defined times post-administration to see how much of the drug had been metabolized by specific tissues in a set timeframe.

The team is still validating these emerging methods and drafting papers for peer-reviewed journals describing the process they've used to create this technology. Shaffer said they're still a few months away from using the organ chips en masse for huge studies – and they need to expand to include tissues from other breeds – but she thinks the microfluidic chips could be useful for pre-clinical analysis of new therapeutic drugs.

“The big sell with our horse-on-a-chip technology is that it's going to significantly reduce animal use for studies – reduce euthanasia, reduce the need for research herds,” she said. “We can now perform the majority of upstream pre-clinical analyses in the lab using our technology that recreates the dynamic environment within the horse. Before, we'd study the effects of a new drug using expensive and limited research herds. Now, we can perform critical toxicity and safety studies before the candidate drug is ever injected into a horse.

“The key to our technology is that we don't need to euthanize additional horses. We can go back to our cryobank of Thoroughbred tissue and enrich for tissue-specific stem cells to essentially grow equine microfluidic organ-chips indefinitely. My research team has developed several innovative methods that allow us to keep using and expanding these diverse equine tissues indefinitely.”

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What We Know (And What We Don’t) About Equine Gastric Ulcers And The Impact Of Treatment On Bones

Gastric ulcers in horses have been a problem for trainers, owners, and managers for years now, and studies suggest a majority of racehorses and performance horses suffer from them. As a result, they've been a topic of much academic research in the past five years.

Dr. Ben Sykes, assistant professor of equine internal medicine at Massey University, sat down with the Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation recently to give the public an idea of what we've learned in the past five years and what he and other researchers plan to focus on in the next five.

A complete replay of Sykes's seminar is below. A few key takeaways:

First of all, the term most of us use to describe this issue in horses is a bit outdated. Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome (EGUS) is still the common terminology in lots of advertising and lay articles about the topic, but that's actually a holdover from before we knew that there were two distinct types of ulcer-like disorders that could be happening in a horse's stomach.
Technically, there are now two terms in use which are more specific: Equine Squamous Gastric Disease and Equine Glandular Gastric Disease. Squamous gastric disease refers to ulcers in the upper half of the stomach, characterized by ulcers easily viewed on gastroscope. Glandular Gastric Disease refers to lesions [which technically aren't ulcers, but look and behave similarly to true ulcers] in the lower half of the stomach, particularly around the part where the stomach empties into the gut.

Until recently, gastroscopes were only long enough to reach the squamous part of the stomach, so we didn't really know if there could be problems lurking further along. The two terms really only came about in the last several years when the longer gastroscopes became common. Research we have on gastric ulcers in horses prior to 2015 is almost certainly referring to Equine Squamous Gastric Disease. Equine Glandular Gastric Disease is much less understood.
Why does this matter? The two diseases exist independently of each other, with different possible causes and different treatments. For Sykes, squamous ulcers come about as a result of management decisions that increase damage of stomach acid to the top of the stomach. The ulcers are caused by two types of acid – hydrochloric acid, which is reduced by common treatments like omeprazole, and volatile fatty acids, which are not addressed by omeprazole and come about as a way to digest grain. Sykes said researchers think that this acid damage occurs during exercise.
Studies have shown that exercise drops stomach pH, increasing the acidity. This is primarily because the abdominal muscles at a trot or canter squeeze the stomach into an hourglass shape, pushing the acid that was at the bottom of the stomach, where it was being buffered by a lot of fibrous feed material, toward the top, which is more likely to be fairly empty or contain thinner, more watery material. It's quite easy for the acid to splash around at the top of the stomach and cause damage.

High carbohydrate diets can be a problem for horses with this disorder since they require more volatile fatty acids to break down the structure of the carbs. That doesn't mean you can't feed an ulcery horse grain, Sykes said – you just have to do it in moderation. A balanced commercially processed feed provides a lot of important nutrients to working horses. Low carb, high fat and high fiber diets are good choices for keeping a horse fed without increasing ulcer risk.
Equine Glandular Gastric Disease on the other hand, occurs in the lower part of the stomach where the environment is commonly pretty acidic. Sykes said he thinks the disease occurs because the natural defense mechanisms of the stomach lining there have been compromised for some reason.
There's no evidence diet impacts Equine Glandular Gastric Disease, but workload might. Studies have shown that long stretches of work without days off make a horse more likely to exhibit signs of Equine Glandular Gastric Disease, and behavioral stress may be a factor as well. Horses with glandular ulcers have been shown to produce higher levels of cortisol in stressful situations than horses without glandular ulcers, though we don't know whether stress caused the ulcers or the ulcers worsened the horses' stress reaction.
A few discoveries from recent data: Perhaps surprisingly, omeprazole, the go-to treatment for gastric ulcers, does its best work on a relatively empty stomach. One study compared the acidity of horse's stomachs when they were fed free choice hay round the clock versus the usual racehorse schedule of two big meals with some hay offered in between. Researchers found that the drug worked best when the horse had an empty stomach first thing in the morning.
It seems misoprostal may be a better treatment for glandular ulcers than omeprazole, which works well on squamous ulcers. Both options improved horses' symptoms, but the misoprostal showed more healing of lesions on gastroscopy.
A new form of omeprazole available via intramuscular injection may show promise for horses with both types of ulcers. The drug isn't accessible in most of the United States yet, but one peer-reviewed study showed 100% healing of squamous ulcers and 75% healing of glandular ulcers after two doses.
For a long time, veterinarians have suspected a connection between prolonged use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like phenylbutazone and ulcers, so for a while they suggested giving omeprazole along with bute as a preventative. Sykes pointed to one peer-reviewed study from 2020 that showed that may not be a good idea. In the study, horses were examined after being given a course of drugs — either bute alone or bute given alongside omeprazole. The bute group did show signs of ulceration while the other group didn't, but there was a high rate of serious intestinal issues among the group receiving bute with omeprazole. In two cases, those intestinal problems proved fatal.
One of the big questions Sykes hopes to answer in the coming years is the potential side effects of long-term omeprazole use in horses – particularly whether or not it increases fracture risk by changing calcium and magnesium absorption. Initially, long-term use of certain types of ulcer drugs in humans was thought to increase fracture risk only in geriatric patients but a recent study in pediatric patients showed that short term treatment of very young children resulted in a 13 percent increase of fracture by age 12 or 13.
We don't have any data to show whether or not the same thing occurs in horses, and part of the reason is that it's difficult to exclude other risk factors for a fracture. The human data does have Sykes worried – not only about the intersection of ulcer treatments and fatal fracture risk, but also about whether ulcer treatments could predispose a horse to bucked shins or other bone maladaptive disorders.

Sykes said thanks to Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation, he and others are currently constructing studies to look at the impacts of common ulcer drugs on mineral absorption in horses. With any luck, we should know more about the issue in the coming years.

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