UC Davis Husband-Wife Vet Team Will Serve at Olympics' Equine Hospital

UC Davis' husband-and-wife veterinary team of Jack Snyder and Sharon Spier are headed for Hong Kong, where they will coordinate medical and surgical aspects of the equine veterinary facility for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The pair has served at the summer games since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea.

Snyder and Spier, both professors in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, will join an international corps of 30 "staff" veterinarians, who will advise the "team" veterinarians accompanying the horses. They will be prepared to evaluate lameness, treat injuries and even perform emergency surgeries. Snyder will be in charge of surgical procedures while Spier, an internal medicine specialist, will deal with infections and internal diseases.

Because the horses cannot leave the Olympic compound for medical treatment once the games begin, a full equine clinic, complete with a pharmacy, must be provided. This specially built veterinary facility is located at the core equestrian venue at Sha Tin, next to the Hong Kong Jockey Club racetrack and close to the city center.

In addition, a temporary veterinary clinic will be located 35 minutes away at the Beas River venue for the cross-country event.

There will be six veterinary teams located on the cross-country course along with three roving teams and mobile cooling units. Eight horse ambulances and four recovery trailers will be available on the day of the cross-country event.

National Institutes of Health grant to fund Colorado State University study of faster, more complete healing of joint injuries

(Via Press Release from CSU)

FORT COLLINS – A Colorado State University veterinarian has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a gene therapy approach to help heal cartilage and prevent osteoarthritis in horses, potentially leading to scientific methods that also may help humans.

The grant, which is $678,000 over five years, will investigate the success of treating joint injuries with a protein injected into injured joints within a virus-like agent called a viral vector.

Cartilage injuries in equine athletes are often career-ending because cartilage heals on only a limited basis. Healing is limited because a specific kind of protein or growth factor, called insulin-like growth factor, is not as available in the joint and cartilage as they are in other areas of the body. Growth factors signal the body to heal because they are responsible for a number of cellular functions, such as those that produce healthy tissue or matrix around the cells within cartilage to help heal injuries. They also trigger cells in cartilage to survive, divide and multiply.

“The lack of healing leads to cartilage degeneration and progression of osteoarthritis,” said Dr. Laurie Goodrich, a veterinarian specializing in equine lameness and surgery at Colorado State University. She is also a professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences and sees equine patients in the university’s James L. Voss Veterinary Teaching Hospital. Goodrich is the principal researcher on the grant. “This prevents many horses from returning to athletic performance events.”
 

Joint injury and subsequent osteoarthritis is the most common reason for ending careers in all equine athletes including racehorses, hunter and jumper horses and Western performance athletes.

The growth factor called insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-I, helps cartilage develop and, studies have shown, promotes healing of injured cartilage. However, researchers have not been able to develop a way to maintain enough IGF-I in an injured joint to help it heal. Goodrich and a team of researchers hope that using a viral vector to deliver DNA that increases production of IGF-I, a protein, will increase healing in damaged joint tissues.
 

The researchers will test the concept in a laboratory setting before beginning clinical trials on horses with joint injuries.

“Ultimately, our goal is to more effectively treat these types of injuries and return horses to their previous levels of performance, whether to the racetrack, show ring or the trail,” Goodrich said. “While the study focuses on horses, the results may ultimately have the potential to help improve human cartilage health and reduce osteoarthritis that often follows a cartilage injury. This is good news for horses and humans alike as advances in joint research in horses will likely apply to humans.”
 

The Federal Drug Administration has recently recognized that the horse is an excellent representative study model for cartilage injury and osteoarthritis in people.
 

Dr. Wayne McIlwraith, director of the Gail Holmes Equine Orthopaedic Research Center, and Dr. R. Jude Samulski, director of the Gene Therapy Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will co-mentor the project.
 

The project will involve collaborations with bio-informatics and gene research experts across Colorado State University, including Ken Reardon, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Hariharan Iyers, a statistics professor. 

 

Also collaborating are Aravind Asokan, Jeff Beecham and Tal Kafri from the University of North Carolina; Dr. Alan Nixon from Cornell University; and Dr. Chisa Hidaka and Chris Chen at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

Tell the Big Horse Where to Go! Curlin Poll Lights Up the Internet!

Curlin can go anywhere in the world he wants to go...not many horses are going to get in his way. (NYRA photo)

The #1 rated racehorse in the world this summer is Curlin. But after you've won it all--he won the Breeders Cup Classic in 2007 and the Dubai World Cup this spring--what's left?

One thought was to start Curlin in a second career as a turf horse and send him to Paris for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, the world's richest grass race. But in his first outing on grass at Belmont last week, Curlin only finished second. So what's next for the big chestnut?

He doesn't know. Do you have any ideas? Apparently lots of people out there do have ideas: In less than 48 hours, nearly 10,000 people have cast votes in an Internet poll that asks, "Where should Curlin go next?"

Jess Jackson, owner of 2007 Horse of the Year, Curlin, posted the question on http://www.stonestreetfarms.com/ on Wednesday and invited the public to let their voices be heard on Curlin's future.

"I knew that Curlin had a lot of fans and people invested in his future but this is more than we could have ever expected," said Mr. Jackson. "It is wonderful to see the public take interest in a horse that is changing the face of the industry for the better."

Currently the public votes are in favor of a Turf campaign for Curlin. As of Thursday, July 17, 2008 the results were:

Question: Where should Curlin go next?
Turf Campaign: 50%
Dirt Campaign: 32%
Synthetic Surface: 11%
Retire: 7%

The poll became active at on Wednesday, July 15 and will continue to be live until July 30. The final results will be posted on July 31, 2008.

I wonder if he can jump...there's a big horse show in Hong Kong next month!

By the way, Curlin has a separate web site just for his fans: http://www.gocurlin.com

NBC Announces Olympic Broadcast Schedule for Equestrian Events

It's getting closer! Have you ordered cable tv? Have you sold the family china on eBay so you can go to the big box store and bring home a wide-screen tv? Do you have all the takeout menus together in one drawer?

Oh, and it will be August: maybe invest in an air conditioner, too. You can always put it in your horse's stall when the Games are over.

Today NBC announced the broadcast schedule for equestrian events, if you can call it that. It's pretty loose. For some events, they just give a 12 hour broadcast slot and indicate that the event will be shown in that zone. In some cases---several cases--it's in the midde of the night.

Here's what they are promising right now:

Friday, Aug. 8
NBC and NBC HD, 8 p.m.-Midnight — Opening Ceremony

Saturday, Aug. 9
USA and USA HD, 2 a.m.-2 p.m. — Women's Soccer (LIVE); Women's Basketball (LIVE); Equestrian - Eventing Dressage; Beach Volleyball; Women's Fencing; Women's Shooting; Badminton; Women's Weightlifting


Sunday, Aug. 10
USA and USA HD, 2 a.m.-2 p.m. — Men's Soccer; Men's Basketball - (LIVE); Tennis (LIVE); Beach Volleyball; Equestrian – Dressage (Eventing, Day 2); Women's Archery; Men's Weightlifting

Monday, Aug 11
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Equestrian - Eventing Cross Country

Tuesday, Aug. 12
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Equestrian - Eventing Gold Medal Finals (Show Jumping)

Wednesday, Aug. 13
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Tennis; Equestrian - Team Dressage

Thursday, Aug. 14
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Tennis - Semifinals; Equestrian - Team Dressage Gold Medal Final

Friday, Aug. 15
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Equestrian - Jumping Competition; Tennis Semifinal

Saturday, Aug. 16
MSNBC, 5 a.m.-5 p.m. — Men's Soccer (LIVE); Baseball; Women's Wrestling (LIVE); Beach Volleyball; Men's Badminton; Equestrian - Individual Dressage

Sunday, Aug. 17
NBC and NBC HD, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. — Women's Basketball (LIVE); Beach Volleyball; Women's; Cycling; Women's Table Tennis; Equestrian - Team Jumping Competition; Rowing

Monday, Aug. 18
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. Equestrian - Team Jumping Final

Tuesday, Aug. 19
OXYGEN, 6-8 p.m. — Synchronized Swimming; Equestrian - Individual Dressage Gold Medal Final (my schedule says that would be the freestyle)

Wednesday, Aug. 20
Day Off!

Thursday, Aug 21
NBC and NBC HD, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. — Men's Swimming; Gymnastics; Women's Water Polo; Equestrian - Individual Jumping Gold Medal Final; Softball

As you can no doubt tell, these will almost certainly not be broadcast live, but at least some will be in high definition. NBC's web site says that they will be streaming many events live, but their web site has some pretty high tech requirements for hardware and operating systems. Most of us would need an expensive upgrade, if not a whole new computer and broadband connection, to make their specs.

So: you have two weeks to find the remote...And don't forget to send a donation to the USET! Visit www.uset.com and do it online!

...And the White Horse You Rode in On: Genetics Research Unravels White Horse Code, Finds Suprises

This Lipizzaner foal at the Spanish Riding School's breeding farm in Piber, Austria, will soon start turning gray; he will eventually be almost white. As gray horses mature, their chances of developing melanoma, a form of skin cancer, can be as high as 75 percent. Swedish researchers found that gene regulation problems are common to all white horses and that they are all descended from a single, original white horse.

Sunday morning means reading as many newspapers as possible around here. It doesn't mean reading scientific journals, but when the Sunday papers are quoting the journal Nature Genetics for a study about horses, the keyboard goes back into action, especially when it had me thinking about equine icons.

Silver. Thunderhead. The Lippizaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School. Hirohito's white stallion. Desert Orchid. Milton. Abdullah. Snowman. Napoleon's Marengo. The list goes on and on. And let's not forget those white chalk horses cut into those British hillsides by the ancient horse worshippers. And that white horse your knight in shining armor is sure to be riding.

White horses are a symbol of something, we've never been quite sure what. Are they truly superior or just eyecatching? Is it saying something about the horse itself or is it what they say about the person riding them? Could Buffalo Bill Cody have ridden anything but a white horse? 

But if you have ever owned a white or "gray" horse, you may well know the worries of melanoma, a type of skin cancer that has become so common that about 75 percent of gray horses older than 15 years of age have a benign form of melanoma that in some cases develops into a malignant melanoma.

An international team led by researcher Leif Andersson, shown at left, at Uppsala University has now identified the mutation causing this spectacular trait and show that white horses carry an identical mutation that can be traced back to a common ancestor that lived thousands of years ago. The study is interesting for medical research since this mutation also enhances the risk for melanoma.

Here's some background: A "gray" horse is born dark (black, brown or chestnut) but the graying process starts as soon as the foal's first year and they are normally completely white by six to eight years of age. However, the skin remains pigmented. Thus, the process resembles graying in humans but the process is ultrafast in these horses. The research presented now demonstrates that all gray (white) horses carry exactly the same mutation which must have been inherited from a common ancestor that lived thousands of years ago.

That makes the Thoroughbred breed--descended from three Arabian stallions--look quite diverse, in comparison.

The study reported today has also given new insight in a molecular pathway that may lead to tumor development. Andersson and his team propose that the gray mutation stimulates growth of melanocytes and that this leads to a premature loss of the melanocyte stem cells needed for hair pigmentation whereas the mutation promotes an expansion of some of the melanocytes causing skin pigmentation. The gray mutation does not change any protein structure but it affects the genetic regulation of two genes.

(To oversimplify: the mutation causes two reactions, one in the skin and one in the coat. The key cells needed to color the hair are lost, while the key cells that color the skin multiply.)

The researchers found that the white horses carry an extra copy of a DNA segment located in one of these genes.

"It is very likely that regulatory mutations like the one we found in these white horses constitute the dominating class of mutations explaining differences between breeds of domestic animals," concludes Leif Andersson.

Now, that's news.

Video: Watch Dutch Dressage Team Horses Enter Quarantine for Olympics

There are two women in the world who can get away with the appellation "dressage queen" without it being an exaggeration. Both are about to embark on the trip of a lifetime to Hong Kong, and are likely to be one-two/gold-silver (ah, but which one on top?) at the Hong Kong Olympic Dressage competition next month.

The horses of both Germany's Isabel Werth and the Netherlands' Anky van Grunsven are settling into quarantine. Anky's horses are in Handel, Holland for isolation and observation before they are flown to Hong Kong. They will be in isolation for the next eight days.

Luckily for us, Dutch television filmed the departure of Anky's Salinero and Painted Blank, and you can see a little behind-the-scenes glimpse of the training center for Anky and Svef Jepsen, the Dutch chef d'equipe. The horse vans are amazing; the "Hunter Douglas" one really is related to those honeycomb blinds in your house. The company sponsors the #2 horse on the Dutch team, Hunter Douglas Sunrise, a beautiful mare ridden by Imke Schellekens-Bartels. That combination will surely be at or near the top in Hong Kong.

You will see the vet taking swabs from the nostrils of the horses before they are allowed to unload at the quarantine facility.

The Olympics will be here before we know it!

TIME Magazine Mourns O'Connorless Olympic Eventing Team...and the Loss of Theodore

Theodore O'Connor, ridden by Karen O'Connor at the 2007 and 2008 Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event

There are three O'Connors whose names are missing from the roster of the 2008 US Eventing Team for the Olympics in Hong Kong. Multiple medalist David O'Connor has retired from competition, and his wife Karen is an asterisk to the team as a third alternate with her horse Mandiba. To head to Hong Kong without the O'Connors' experience and talent is a first. It has been decades since neither of them was on the team. Some people reading this blog have never seen an Olympics eventing competition that did not feature one, and usually both, of the O'Connors.

But it's the absence of the third O'Connor, Theodore, that made international news this week. "Teddy", aka the bionic pony and Pan Am Games gold medalist, was euthanized after a terrible accident at home in Virginia a month ago.

Among those pausing to remember him and to mourn the O'Connorless team is Sean Gregory, writing in this week's TIME Magazine. No, Teddy, didn't make the cover but I can't remember the last time that TIME dedicated an entire article to a sport or pleasure horse.

Click here to read TIME's tribute to Karen and Teddy and also to Max Corcoran, Teddy's groom and best pal. It's a classy read, and not what you'd expect to see in a newsmagazine full of Presidential election politics, Middle East crises, and economy coverage.

Just like Teddy: not what you'd expect, at all.

Equine Influenza Paralyzes Religious Festival in India

+ On d waY of aMarNaTh +, originally uploaded by @Mr's...
Those ant-like specks down in the valley are people and horses.

Disease outbreaks in India tend to show numbers incomprehensible to our American sensibilities. The country has had to deal with bird flu in recent years but now a large outbreak of Equine Influenza (EI or "horse flu") is causing chaos as the Amarnath Yatra religious festival brings thousands of pilgrims to a site high in the Himalayas. The problem is that the area--and the horses-- are infected with EI.

Equine Influenza is a relatively minor illness in horses, but it is highly contagious. In horses that are weak, the disease can have devastating secondary effects such as strangles.

Organizers of the religious festival bring in hundreds or maybe even thousands of horses and ponies to carry the pilgrims up in the mountains. Way up into the mountains. The world's highest mountains.

The Indian army has set up a horse veterinary camp, where they have treated an amazing 600 horses in the past two days and provided medications at no charge. Treatment includes helping horses with respiratory problems caused by the flu with what the government's press release describes as an antiseptic inhalation chamber.

The festival celebrates a holy cave high in the mountains, at 14,500 feet. Horses and ponies are one of the preferred methods to get to the festival, although some people walk...and others get lifts in helicopters.

It's interesting that the ponywallahs, or wranglers, charge the pilgrims to ride according to how much the rider weighs.

The Indian government is now worried about what will happen when the two-month festival ends and the pilgrims (and horses) disperse.

When Equine Influenza hit India in 1987, an estimated 83,000 horses became sick and a large percentage died. The outbreak was blamed on a shipment of racehorses from France, since local horses had no exposure to the disease.

India is home to almost two million equids, most of whom are working animals in the northern zones.

No Indian nationals qualified for the 2008 Olympic equestrian events in Hong Kong. Australia's EI outbreak of 2007 almost prevented that country' participation because of Hong Kong's very strict import and disease control regulations.

Equine Hospital Worker Diagnosed with Deadly Hendra Virus in Australia

This just in from the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) at Harvard University; please see other posts on this blog from the past week for more on the deadly Hendra virus and the recent spate of cases in the vicinty of the Australian city of Brisbane.

Begin report:

Queensland Health has confirmed that a person working at veterinary clinic on Brisbane's bayside has contracted infection with the potentially deadly Hendra virus. The person was among a number tested for the virus after several horses contracted the disease at a Redlands veterinary hospital. So far all other people who had been in close contact with the sick horses remain well.

Queensland Health's Dr Brad McCall says the worker was admitted to a Brisbane hospital yesterday [14 Jul 2008] for observation and was allowed to return home this afternoon.

"A veterinary worker has returned home from hospital with diagnosed Hendra virus infection and the worker remains well," he said. "We continue to work with the staff and other people who have been involved with this at the Redlands Veterinary clinic to monitor their health and to assist them with any questions they have."

Queensland health minister Stephen Robertson says the department will closely monitor the case in Brisbane, and the discovery of the virus in a north Queensland horse. "We would be relying on the expert advice of DPI & F [Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, Queensland] as to what this represents in terms of incidences amongst horses, our primary concern of course is in relation to the potential for horse to human contact and that's where we pay most of our attention," he said.

(end report)

Background and commentary from ISID:

No clinical details of the patient are provided in this report. The release of the patient from hospital suggests that his condition is not a cause for concern. More precise information would be appreciated.

Previously in Queensland in 1994, a fatal infection in horses and humans was attributed to a previously unknown paramyxovirus, now named Hendra virus after the district of Brisbane where the outbreak occurred. Hendra virus, together with Nipah virus, now constitutes the _Henipavirus_ genus of the family _Paramyxoviridae_. A 2nd case of Hendra virus infection in horses in Queensland was described in 2007.

The natural reservoir of these viruses is the fruit bat (genus _Pteropus_), which is abundant in regions extending from the western Pacific to the eastern coast of Africa. Serological studies have established that as many as half the fruit bats in colonies throughout these regions may have antibodies against this virus genus. Outbreaks of Hendra virus disease in horses and humans, however, have been limited to the Brisbane area of Queensland.

Hendra virus was first isolated from specimens collected during the outbreak of respiratory and neurological disease in horses and humans in Hendra in 1994. In that outbreak the 1st human cases of Hendra virus disease were recognized. Of the three individuals known to be infected, two had a respiratory illness with severe flu-like signs and symptoms. One of the three Hendra virus infections was marked by a delayed onset of progressive encephalitis. Two of the three human patients infected with Hendra virus died.

(end commentary from ISID)

Blogger's note: I have uncharacteristically pasted the exact reports from ISID here so that I would not misinterpret any of the information. This is a very serious situation, since Hendra is one of the few diseases that is transmitted from horses to humans. It is not stated if humans can in turn infect horses. Hendra is a suburb of Brisbane, in northeastern Australia, just below the famous Great Barrier Reef.

Still Riding with Barbaro...And You?

It was exactly two years ago this week that surgeon Dean Richardson of the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center announced that Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was suffering from laminitis as a complication of his surgery to repair multiple fractures in his right hind leg.

As they say, the rest is history. Five months later, Barbaro was dead; the decision to euthanize him was made when he developed laminitis in his front feet.

I can't tell you that our understanding and treatment options for laminitis have improved radically in two years. But I can tell you that progress has been made on the funding front. Pfizer Animal Health joined forces with the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA) to create The Barbaro Fund, which helps fund research into laminitis.

The University of Pennsylvania has created the world's first Laminitis Institute at the New Bolton Center campus, under the direction of Dr. James Orsini.

Information from the Fourth International Equine Conference on Laminitis and Diseases of the Foot, held in November 2007, is being disseminated to veterinarians, farriers, and horse owners in the field. Hopefully, horses are receiving better preventative and early-intervention care because of the conference; watch for news of the Fifth conference, to be held in November 2009, to be announced soon. Check www.laminitisconference.com for updates.

However you give and whatever you give, please do give. Pfizer has created blue memory bands for Barbaro, which can be purchased at tack shops and feed stores where counter displays of Pfizer wormers are used. For just a few dollars, you can join the Barbaro memory collective.

If you can give more and do more, please do. Watch this blog for lots more news about laminitis research that will help your horse, and every horse, avoid the most painful disease imaginable.

Secretariat, Affirmed, Sunday Silence, and Barbaro are just a few of the famous Kentucky Derby winners who died because of this terrible condition.

Your horse, my horse, and any horse could be next.