Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Now Patti - don't go Ginny... er Postal on us.

The standards of practice for large animal work aren't anything like the strictures 
observed in a hospital setting.  Protecting an equine from the mucous membranes of 
another equine in its immediate vicinity is impossible.  While you can tell a person 
to "observe that their doctors/nurses/others clean their hands before touching them", 
no horse is going to do that.  They'll just rub their faces on the horse next to them 
and your "clean" environment is contaminated.  Cross contamination from other equines 
either from direct contact or drinking from the same trough or eating hay at the same 
pile in a VC is unavoidable and the number of such incidents outweigh by hundreds if 
not thousands of times the number of contacts with vets so that even IF the vets' 
hands were sterile, the percentage of "protected" horses would be so small compared 
to the number of "exposed" horses that ANY expense in time or money on sterilizing 
vets' hands would be totally wasted.  Contrast the APPARENT lack of concern vets have 
with sterile conditions in their workaday real world with the standards they demand 
in a surgical setting and you'll see that WHEN they have a semblance of control over 
the situation, they do provide their patients with as sterile an environment as they 
can.  But checking horses at a ride?  A clinic on your ranch?  No... the animals in 
those settings have so much access to each other that any contaminating the vet might 
do pales to insignificance.


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