Sick Horses

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

K S SWIGART   katswig@earthlink.net

> My horse has a snotty, greenish slim coming from her
> nose.  She is dragging around not eager to expend
> energy.  When she ate some carrott pieces she kinda
> coughed them back up.  She is however able to eat
> grain.  I took her where she could do her favorite and
> eat some grass.  She nibbled but was not too excited.
> ...
> Has anyone seen these characteristics in a horse? 

Yes, your horse probably has some kind of infection 
of the upper respiratory tract (since I as assuming 
that the vet probably listened to your horse's lungs
and determined that it had not progressed that far
and therefore needed to be treated as pneumonia or
you would have reported that).

There are countless pathogens that can infect a 
horse's upper respiratory tract, and the only way
to find out exactly which one is to do lab work to
culture it (and sometimes even that doesn't work).

However, for most upper respiratory tract infections
(no matter what the pathogen) the treatment is 
pretty much the same:  stall rest, monitor the fever
and bring it down if it gets too high, and monitor the
lungs to ensure that the infection is not migrating
there.

Some people will start the horse on a course of anti-
biotics in order to avoid the possibility that a 
secondary infection develops; however, my own opinion
about this is that if you are going to start treating
a bacterial infection, you should also run a culture
to discover just what bacteria you are/may be dealing
with.  Because then if the anti-biotics don't work,
you will have the information available about what 
pathogen you are dealing with, and what is the best
drug to treat it with.

Cultures take days (sometimes as much as a week) to get
information back, so if you wait until your course of 
anti-biotics hasn't worked before you run the culture,
then you don't have the information when you need it.
However, if you do the lab work immediately, frequently
the horse will have recovered before the results come
back.

In any event.  You want to reduce your horses' 
respiratory stress (i.e. no activity that requires
them to breath hard, but you also do not want to
coop them up in a box where there is little circulation
of fresh air).  And you want to slowly bring them back
to work.  Their respiratory systems have been compromised
and even after the symptoms have gone away, they are
still more suceptible to any of the pathogens that exist
all the time in the environment.

kat
Orange County, Calif.