When owning and caring for an animal, consistently checking their health and ensuring a clean environment, can be as important the animal’s health as it would be to a person. Farm animals in particular are more exposed to the possibility of contracting illnesses considering that they are out in the open and in less controlled environments.
Horses are a common animal on farms and because they are usually used for their strength and stamina, keeping them healthy is vastly important. One condition that poses a serious risk to them is equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV). This disease is usually transmitted through blood sucking insects such as horse flies.
EIVA is so contagious to horses, that just one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood from an animal with a chronic case of this illness during a feverish episode, contains enough virus molecules to infect up to 10,000 horses. Fortunately, only around one horsefly out of six million is likely to pickup and transmit EIAV to other horses.
However, once it is contracted, EIAV is so aggressive that the horse may develop severe, acute signs of the disease and even die within two to three weeks without treatment. Part of what makes this condition so dangerous, is how easily it can go undetected.
The vast majority of carriers of EIAV are unapparent carriers; they show no overt clinical abnormalities that would indicate infection. The bacteria that causes EIAV can survive in reservoirs of infection for extended periods of time. Fortunately, horses who do not show any signs of the disease have dramatically lower concentrations of the infectious bacteria than horses exhibiting active clinical signs of equine infectious anemia virus expression.
With regular veterinary clinical diagnostics and equine infectious anemia virus antibody tests, early indicators of infection can be detected before it is too late. Otherwise, there may not be much time between diagnosis and unfortunate results. Helpful research also found here.