Strangles: Pulling Back the Curtain

And Dr. Donata, I want to move back to you because we've mentioned biosecurity on a little bit of a surface level, but I want to come to you on this.

The B word.

The B word, right? And dig a little bit deeper.

Because this disease is actually relatively easy to manage in the patient.

I use the term easily, I guess, with air quotes.

But it's often the people that are a little bit harder to control here, right? In most cases, I guess that's true.

So talk to us about biosecurity and your recommendations for managing strangles in a barn, boarding farm, or ranch, you know, whatever setting that you're in where there are other horses around.

And the worry for disease spread is high with this one.

So what do we do? You know, what are best practices? How are we the most responsible writers and caregivers we can be to not spread this thing?

Yeah, I mean, managing an active strangles outbreak or even an isolated case is...

It's challenging.

It takes diligence and work, and it requires horses to not move on or off the property sometimes for weeks at a time, all of which are reasons for people to not enjoy having strangles on their facilities.

And so I think it's important that we do that to prevent spread so that one infected barn doesn't turn into multiple infected barns.

But To Dr. Pasturla's point earlier about what we really probably need to do is double down on trying to identify and eliminate these asymptomatic carriers that are responsible for keeping this pathogen alive and well in our populations in all states.

But to your question, if an individual case is identified on a particular facility, then we were just chatting about this before we started the recording, that this is a reportable disease in all 50 states, which means that if your veterinarian or the lab get a positive result on one of the testing platforms that Dr. Pasterla mentioned, they will report it to the state veterinary authority.

And then it depends by state whether or not the state veterinarians, which can be they have local teams of veterinary support personnel all the way up to the state vet, how involved they may get in the mitigation and management process.

So that may go from they're going to mark that the case was recorded and they'll let it be handled entirely by the farm veterinarian that did the original diagnostics.

all the way up to in states where it's fully reportable, they're going to actually deploy a local regulatory veterinarian who will help manage the outbreak mitigation process.

And usually that involves quarantining the facility, so shutting down any horses coming on or off the premises itself.

And of course, that The goal of that is obvious, to not let it off the property and not let any hopefully unexposed horses come onto the property to get exposed.

And then the second prong, so it's kind of a two-prong approach.

You want to make sure the infection doesn't spread to other premises via quarantine.

And then you want to make sure that you try to minimize spread within the facility itself.

And that will involve, in general, we recommend that horses on a specific facility get separated and categorized into three groups.

And we like to color code them.