The Home of Rest for Horses, Britain’s leading equine charity, is giving £228,000 to The Animal Health Trust,
Newmarket, to create new tests to help identify horses which are believed to be carriers of strangles - a
potentially fatal disease.
Streptococcus equi (S. equi) is the causative agent of strangles, a disease characterised by nasal discharge and fever, followed by abscesses in local lymph nodes.
About 10% of horses that recover from strangles become carriers of the disease. They harbour the bacterium in pus located in the guttural pouch at the end of the eustachian tube - the passage between the ear and the throat. This is the main reason the infection persists between outbreaks. When carriers are identified by analysis of fluid recovered from flushing the guttural pouches, they can be treated effectively but this technique is expensive, time-consuming and requires an experienced veterinarian.
Thanks to previous Home of Rest funding, the Trust has already identified a number of S. equi proteins that may be suitable for inclusion in new tests to identify horses which have been exposed to S. equi during strangles outbreaks.
Now the Animal Health Trust it is going to extend those findings by investigating 1,000 horses which have been involved in strangles outbreaks and anticipates identifying about 100 carriers of S. equi.
The Trust expects to identify a subset of S. equi specific proteins which can be used to identify horses with sub clinical strangles and to determine whether horses carrying the bacterium can be identified by a characteristic immune response.
This would greatly assist veterinarians in resolving existing and preventing new outbreaks of strangles.
For advice on Strangles, please click here.
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