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  Discussion on Is the EIA research current?
Author Message
Member:
dzaccheo

Posted on Wednesday, Jun 17, 2009 - 4:43 pm:

Hello all! I was wondering how current the information is in the article on EIA, particularly the information on the transmission of the disease.

I am in Italy and there is a current outbreak here after it had been eradicated. I am concerned because there is an infected horse about 2 miles away as the crow flies. We never get any closer than this as when we ride out, the trail/dirt road takes us the other way, and the horse is quarantined to its property.

I felt quite reassured after I read the article, as this horse is in the carrier state and should be less contagious, however, when one of our horses quit eating and got a fever recently, and the lab work came back that the horse was also anemic, the vet was CONVINCED he had EIA. He had a very sensitive type of test run that only one vet in Italy performs. It is based on DNA and is incredibly accurate the vet says. Has had horses test positive with this after neg on the Coggins.

Well they ran the test 4 times and everything negative. We said we were not surprised as the horse has not been off the property and no new ones in so where could he have contracted it. I mentioned the information in your article about the horse/deer fly tending not to travel too far once it starts feeding on an animal, and the virus only surving a short time on the fly etc...

His response was that all of that research is old and not valid and there have been cases he has seen recently where there is no explaination where the horse contracted the disease so it is obviously spread in other ways that we do not know about yet.

This obviously concerns me as we have a barnful of horses about 2 miles away from an infected horse.

Dr. O, can you let me know if there are new things know about EIA.

Thank you very much!!!
Moderator:
DrO

Posted on Wednesday, Jun 17, 2009 - 6:47 pm:

As current as we can make it Danita and I read the published journals every day. However if you push the Library of Medicine button at the bottom of the article it will bring up research on EIA that has not even been published yet. You don't even have to fill in a search field, we do that for you.

The article is the result of reviewing hundreds of research projects, over a hundred years of published experience with this disease and my own personal experiences over the past three decades. What in particular does your veterinarian say is incorrect?

One should not question research because of it's age but question it by finding examples that contradict the conclusions. But neither does it serve us well if we think any conclusions are written in stone blinding us to possible contradictory evidence. Even if a fact today we must consider this organism evolves. Perhaps a more virulent and environmentally tougher organism is around the next corner.

But even without imagining some new super EIA it is possible to imagine odd circumstances that might account for longer distances of transmission than ordinarily seen with insect vectors. For instance iatrogenic (doctor borne) infection can travel much further in a short period than a insect vector. Some contaminated equine serological products appear to hold the organism for quite some time.

The recent Irish outbreak may be one of the best studied and published investigations of a natural outbreak concerning transmission. It concluded:
(Source: An outbreak of equine infectious anaemia in Ireland during 2006: the modes of transmission and spread in the Kildare cluster. More SJ, Aznar I, Myers T, Leadon DP, Clegg A. Equine Vet J. 2008 Nov;40(7):709-11.)

The probable modes of transmission and spread in the Meath cluster included iatrogenic transmission (likely in 13 cases, possible in one), close contact (likely in 4) and vector-borne transmission (n = 3). In the Kildare cluster, vector-borne transmission was likely in one confirmed case, but remains uncertain in a further 16 cases (More et al. 2008).


They go on to comment on how there were many differences between this outbreak and typical US outbreaks, in particular the large number of iatrogenic infections. But there was one other oddity: the 4 close contact infections. In each of these cases it was a mare/foal pair. The foals had been infected iatrogenically but the mares became infected subsequent to the foals infection. They found this happened during a period of low vector activity and a iatrogenic component was hard to identify.

It is important to note that just because the source of an infection is not known it does not mean it has been flown in from far away. I do not know any research, including this one, that contradicts the information in the article and decades of experience with this disease and quarantine of thousands of horses based on these recommendations support it. I would be glad to review any contrary research he has on this matter.
DrO
Member:
dzaccheo

Posted on Thursday, Jun 18, 2009 - 10:27 am:

Thank you very much, you have put my mind at ease!!!
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