Here is an excerpt of an article in The Horse. I don’t recall reading about this in The Chronicle. What facility did this happen at? Article says some of the horses were kept in an isolation barn on site for as ong as 30 days.
A Real-World Outbreak
No matter the precautions, no matter the circumstances, outbreaks can happen. But what happens when that outbreak isn’t confined to a local barn or backyard stable but spreads through one of the country’s biggest equestrian facilities? That is exactly what happened when a pathogen interrupted a major USEF show in early 2019. Holly Helbig, DVM, owner of Hawthorne Veterinary Clinic, in Dublin, Ohio, is a show veterinarian that works in Kentucky, Ohio, and across the Midwest. She was the veterinarian on the ground managing the cases.
Initially, a handful of horses housed at the show facility developed nasal discharge and low-grade fevers. Helbig says she used serum amyloid A (SAA, an acute-phase protein and marker of inflammation) readers to assess the horses’ infection status. Based on those results, she started an isolation barn on the property. She sent out bloodwork to test for common infectious diseases and soon discovered she was dealing with EIV.
The show facility staff immediately assisted Helbig in organizing the isolation barn for any horse showing clinical signs of influenza.
“We had a team of people just on the isolation barn,” she says. “Horses were hand-walked three times a day in the aisle. The barn was about 100 feet from the main showgrounds.”
