"BioSecurity" on the backstretch
/Article by Ken Snyder
Cleanliness, or biosecurity, is essential to horse health and is at the core of minimizing infectious disease outbreaks and subsequent quarantines. Failures in biosecurity can mean canceled race days; idle trainers; and most important and awful, dead or injured horses.
Recent history reveals the importance of biosecurity on both the racetrack and also Thoroughbred breeding farms. In 2021, a life-threatening Rotavirus B outbreak in foals swept through farms in Central Kentucky, taxing farm staff and management with contagion containment.
More recently, in 2022, an outbreak of equine Herpesvirus-1 at Churchill Downs resulted in a quarantine of as many as 13 horses in one barn. Contagiousness of this EHV-1 meant horses even indirectly exposed to horses with the virus were also quarantined in two other barns.
EVH-1 isa far more serious threat in that more horses risk exposure on racetracks than on a farm. The virus causes respiratory disease, neonatal death, and neurologic disease, EHM (equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy). EHM is often fatal and if not, can leave long-term problems. Symptoms presenting EHM are heart-rending: Horses will lack coordination, have weakness or paralysis in some or all of their limbs, and become unable to balance or stand.
Contact and contagion are the dangers to horse health with viruses like EHV-1 or rotavirus B. Horses travel, and Kentucky might be the busiest crossroad in the world with Thoroughbreds coming in from all points in the country and world and traveling out to racetracks out-of-state and, of course, foreign countries. Experts agree that every effort has to be made in this state and elsewhere with biosecurity to prevent repeats of what happened last year and in 2021.
They also are in agreement that trainers are the first line of defense.
Because they see and care for horses daily, trainers will be the first to note abnormalities or symptoms of disease, according to Dr. Stuart Brown, vice president of equine safety at Keeneland Race Course.
“Trainers are the sentinels, the keepers of horse health, them and their attending veterinarians,” he said. “They're at the forefront of working with regulatory veterinarians as well as the state veterinary offices to maintain a healthy population of horses.”
The consensus among industry people like Brown is that trainers, with only a small minority of exceptions, do an excellent job because so much is at stake.
“By and large, they’re all very attuned to disease transmission,” echoed Dr. Will Farmer, equine medical director for Churchill Downs and all other racing properties.
They have to be, he added. “If a trainer has a sick horse, a groom is taking care of it and multiple horses. There’s the possibility of spreading a disease. Trainers are very keen on biosecurity.“
Trainers, especially, must be sensitive to biosecurity in their barns as they move their stable from one race meet to another and new stalls for their horses.
“I’ve shipped everywhere—Gulfstream, Tampa, New York a lot, Laurel a lot,” said Ian Wilson, assistant trainer to Graham Motion, naming only a few of the destinations for horses at the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland.
He’s encountered conditions he described as “generally good.”
“You never walk into a stall and say, ‘This one needs another bag of shavings or another bale of straw.’
“Where our concern lies is what you don’t know. A clean stall and a dirty stall sometimes don’t look that different.”
Receiving barns, which especially should be as pathogen-free as possible, is not guaranteed. “In New York, I know the gentleman who takes care of the receiving barn and he does a really, really, nice job of it. I’ve watched him clean a stall, and he does it properly. In other places, I’ve seen them pick over a stall really quickly, and off they go.”
While disease outbreaks are sporadic, the goal, of course, is minimizing the maximum potential for occurrences. A mantra for Brown at Keeneland is “the solution to pollution is dilution.” In other words, every resource—human and inanimate—should be brought to bear to combat the potential for disease development, particularly with the cleaning and disinfecting of stalls. Every measure, however, will only dilute or reduce issues that arise.
While receiving barns will have straw down and should be clean, standard operating procedure for trainers moving horses from a barn they’ve occupied to another location and unfamiliar stalls is cleaning and disinfecting before another horse can move in. Stalls are mucked daily and cleaned, but disinfecting is a must. Frequency, though, varies among trainers; some might disinfect weekly, others only monthly.
At Keeneland, the maintenance team follows departed trainers and does a second disinfecting to ensure the next occupant gets a clean environment. “Our team will go in, and they’ll basically strip and clean (disinfect) all of the stalls,” said Brown. “They’ll be left for a period of time for desiccation (allowing stalls to dry out).
“Getting those stalls tossed out and then having them air out and dry as well as being inspected becomes a part of any kind of biosecurity protocol.“
Trainers, with few exceptions, follow guidelines prescribed by the Equine Disease Communication Center to one degree or another. These include scrubbing surfaces with warm, soapy water to remove any traces of organic matter (basically anything that comes out of a horse); allowing the surface to dry; applying a disinfectant; allowing the surface to dry after the application of a disinfectant; and disinfecting crossties if in use.
The choice of disinfectant is at the discretion of a trainer or attending veterinarian. Brown said his maintenance team uses products recommended by the USDA or other regulatory bodies that are specified for controlling the spread of potentially infectious pathogens.
He is investigating a new “delivery system” of a disinfectant from a firm in Nicholasville, Ky., just south of Lexington, produced by Atmosphere Supply. The firm supplies a foaming product for farms of all types that have applications (literally) for racetrack stalls.
Peter Healy, business development manager for the firm, authored a manual, titled Biosecurity for the Equine Industry, after Thoroughbred farm personnel sought help during the rotavirus B epidemic. Healy’s company was asked to assess and critique biosecurity protocols and other practices. “Everybody was in a panic with this new rotavirus back in 2020,” he said.
One key recommendation right off the bat from Healy was to not use bleach. “It is for hard (non-porous) surfaces, not for wood. It does absolutely nothing when applied to wood and could possibly be harmful to a horse.”
Other disinfectants like hydrogen peroxide have the potential to be caustic or acidic and also hazardous. “Horses rubbing against a stall wall are going to come in contact with whatever has been applied,” Healy said.
One particular issue is the application of a disinfectant. Wiping down or spraying with a liquid in a dark stall means the possibility that coverage might be incomplete. A liquid will also run off quickly, according to Healy. The foam disinfectant produced by his company solves both problems and dries in only 10 minutes. Use or frequency of use is at a trainer’s discretion, but it could be applied daily.
Healy also recommends any product containing hypochlorous acid, primarily a salt and water mixture, that can be sprayed daily even while a horse is in the stall, as ingestion will not harm them.
Other measures to battle pathogens or disease-producing agents are largely a matter of common-sense hygiene. Water buckets at the end of a shedrow that every horse passing by can drink from are asking for disease to spread.
“Equipment contacting a horse can also be a source for contamination,” said Brown. “I know two or three trainers that have started dipping chains and shank clips in a water-diluted Nolvasan solution.” Nolvasan is a readily available skin and wound cleanser. It helps prevent disease spread if a hotwalker is going from horse to horse with the same shank, according to Brown.
Pathogens are generally organic but can be carried by humans. Here, too, there are preventive measures. Farmer at Churchill Downs noted that some trainers there are having their help wear gloves at feed time as they mix feed and add supplements. “That’s a proactive approach. They recognize they don’t have control over barn help 24/7,” he said.
Is there a day when grooms and hotwalkers are wearing gloves all the time, or stalls with a “last disinfected” sheet with dates posted on each? All who were questioned for this story can’t see it, but similar and more stringent measures are already in place in Europe. At some racetracks in France, each stall will have a plastic seal that someone must break to enter—a guarantee that a stall has been disinfected.
Over there, stall bedding and cleaning are the responsibility of the racetrack generally as most horses are day shippers. Some trainers have traced ringworm to sanitizing agents used by racecourses. “We are not told what they are using; there’s no real regime. Biosecurity is everything; it’s so important,” said French trainer Ilka Gansera-Leveque.
Gloves, plastic seals, “last disinfected” sheets… Sound far-fetched for American racetracks? Who knows? But if the solution to pollution is dilution…
!["It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…" so wrote Charles Dickens. For horse racing in 2020, it just wasn't where you would expect the best and worst, at least in a modern-day "Tale of Two Racetracks."To wit: Santa Anita began 2020 in the wake of a nightmare: 20 racing fatalities in 2019. The Fair Grounds in New Orleans, on the other hand, was on the cusp of two straight Januarys without a racetrack fatality. If you don't know the rest, you can probably guess what happened, 2020 being 2020: Santa Anita embarked on a record year in 2020 with zero fatalities on the dirt track and one less fatality in turf races than in 2019 [see sidebar]. Meanwhile, at the Fair Grounds—long known as having one of the best surfaces in America—six racetrack fatalities occurred in January, a number more than double the average for this month. Instantly, media attention focused on the Fair Grounds, interest made more acute, perhaps, by the highly publicized spate of fatalities at Santa Anita.Overlooked by a large portion of the media (perhaps conveniently, some would say) is the anomaly that January 2020 represented, not just for the Fair Grounds but also for Thoroughbred racing in America. In terms of catastrophic injury rate, the sport enjoyed the smallest rate of fatalities per 1,000 starts—1.53—in 2019. The Jockey Club created an Equine Injury Database (EID) in 2009, recording statistics and specifically compiling data from 14 leading tracks (including Santa Anita). In that first year, fatalities were 2.0 per 1,000 starts—the highest in the span of the 11-year-old EID. So what happened at the Fair Grounds? Dr. Michael "Mick" Peterson, executive director of the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory, led a team of track management and, perhaps more critical, trainers with horses at the Fair Grounds to examine and analyze the track surface, particularly maintenance practices. Fatalities are multifactorial, and the intent was to address potential issues with the track surface. According to Peterson, unexpected and unpredicted rainfall during training hours occurred in January. Making matters worse, the rain—while amounting to maybe a half to three-quarters of an inch—fell for 45 minutes to an hour. Harrowed before training, the track surface was "open," as Peterson termed it, enabling water to penetrate the surface rather than run off. The result was a surface possibly over-saturated and potentially ripe for injuries and fatalities during races in the afternoon. Closing the door to this possibility meant closing the track if rain was expected or did fall during training and sealing or "floating it," which produces a flat surface for water to run off into the infield. If that sounds simple, it isn't. There are dozens of trainers with stalls full of horses each needing track time, either for leg-stretching gallops or, more importantly, workouts timed out a certain number of days before an upcoming race. Racehorses are athletes who absolutely have to get out of their stalls, and there are no days off. Weather can’t be a deterrent; they run in the rain, and they train in the rain. Stopping training to float and seal a racetrack—something commonly done between afternoon races—is uncommon during training hours and disruptive to trainers’ schedules. Simply put, trainers lose a hunk of training time if the track superintendent floats the surface during workout hours in the morning. Here is where, according to Peterson, the Fair Grounds achieved real success. A group of trainers met with Fair Grounds track manager Jason Boulet, track superintendent Pedro Zavala, and Peterson and basically said, "We're going to have to do that then," referring to track closure during training for surface sealing.For Peterson, Boulet and especially Zavala, this response from trainers with entries, races slated, and owners to whom they are accountable was as jaw-dropping as Santa Anita's zero dirt-track fatality statistic in 2020."It really was one of those perfect moments in interaction between track management and superintendent and trainers," said Peterson, who added, "It's hard to get up in the morning and not know which horses you can train. I was thoroughly impressed with the willingness of trainers to do that." Their only request was as much of a heads-up as possible to trainers if weather radar indicated rain looked likely. Track closure during training for floating was an option left on the table. It was part of “give and take,” as Peterson termed it, to enable trainers to send out horses needing a workout for an upcoming race ahead of a wet track. "If I'm a trainer, I know that I might lose the second half of training because they're going to shut it down and run the floats. Then I can train whatever horses I know I need to get out there in the first set."This is where the industry needs to go—the communication, being reasonable, recognizing the need for give and take at times."The cooperation of trainers at the Fair Grounds should not have been a surprise, given the history at the track. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 provides an anecdote that is very telling about the input of trainers into track conditions and management at this third oldest American racetrack.Katrina flooded the Fair Grounds and washed away the track surface. What replaced it was not nearly as good as pre-Katrina, according to regular Fair Grounds trainers. A group of them, principal among them Al Stall, provided a simple observation: "It was better with the darker sand," said Stall at the time, referring to reddish sand in the pre-Katrina surface.Peterson remembered Boulet calling him to report that trainers were convinced darker spillway sand from the nearby Mississippi River would bring the track back to what it was. "Jason said, 'I think they're crazy. I don't think the color matters,'" recalled Peterson with a laugh. "I said, ‘Jason what they are actually identifying is the little bit of iron oxide in the sand. It's hydrophilic and not hydrophobic, and you know what? I bet they're exactly right.’"In lay terms, hydrophilic means moisture-absorbing and not moisture-resistant (hydrophobic). Stall not only knew what the post-Katrina surface needed but where to find it. The New Orleans native drove Peterson and Boulet to different sand pits in the area, collecting samples of red sand. Peterson took it from there with something called X-ray diffraction testing to identify which source would be best.Sand, however, is far from the only reason for a Fair Grounds surface that was, arguably, the best and safest in America before last January. It is one part of many measures, initiatives and improvements implemented since the "Al Stall tour." And in what may be a shock to many in the media and public, those same measures are in place at other major U.S. racetracks. All account for the continuing decline in racetrack fatalities as recorded by The Jockey Club.The origin of the efforts was a safety initiative launched by Churchill Downs Incorporated in the wake of the breakdowns of Barbaro (2006) and then Eight Belles (2008) in Triple Crown races, according to Peterson. The initiative led to protocols for testing surface samples. At the Fair Grounds each year, testing takes place six weeks before the racing meet starts on Thanksgiving Day—the traditional opening day. "If the composition isn't right, by then we already have the material on-site to match target standards. Then what happens a few weeks before the race meet is we come in with ground-penetrating radar—the biomechanical surface tester—and go through every piece of equipment and test," said Peterson, who doubles as a professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering at the University of Kentucky. If the depth, literally and figuratively, of surface preparation and management is a surprise, a bigger one might be that 13 other leading tracks in America—again, including Santa Anita--perform the same testing to certify optimum track-surface composition. Separate from composition testing before a race meet is daily implementation of a Maintenance Quality System (MQS) with a breadth that is mind boggling. The Fair Grounds’ Zavala, as well as superintendents at the 13 other tracks, chart training times of all horses by workout length, make daily surface-depth or "cushion" measurements at as many as 16 different places on the racetrack and take moisture readings at 18 different spots. Data required in the MQS even calls for logging the speed of the tractors pulling harrows over the track and the direction they travel. The latest addition to the MQS arsenal for Peterson and racing is a new type of weather station that debuted at Keeneland during the fall meet and Breeders' Cup. It supplements daily reports summarizing data from the previous 24 hours of weather with improved real-time data. The objective is to counteract the effects of rapidly changing weather conditions like that experienced at the Fair Grounds last January. The benefits go beyond morning training with updates at, "say, the third race of a race day to enable adjustment for the fifth race by surface crews," said Peterson.The coronavirus, Peterson said, was a barrier to the expansion of MQS to new tracks but not expansion within racetracks already on board with the system. The new weather station is but one example. There is also a new integrated track tester that measures everything from all-important moisture content to something called dielectric constant. It provides improved real-time data to track superintendents on conditions at their specific track through a GPS.Can racing, through track surface improvements, continue to reduce catastrophic racetrack injuries beyond the 16% reduction over the last decade? Peterson is hopeful. "The endpoint I see on this is having in place a process for what they call in manufacturing continuous improvement where we don't just quit when we get a little better."The latest recorded racing fatality rate, again, represents the "best of times." With lessons learned at the Fair Grounds, protocols in the MQS and technology improvements in testing, there is potential that the best can become even better.[SIDEBAR"]A December 16, 2020, story in the Los Angeles Times attributed a reduction in the fatality statistics at Santa Anita Park in 2020 to a "combination of enhanced safety protocols and less racing because of shutdowns caused by the coronavirus.” The story added that "nearby fires could be considered factors [and track closures as a result] in cutting the death count by more than half."Here are the facts: 20 racing fatalities occurred at Santa Anita in 2019—13 on the dirt track and seven on the turf tracks--in 6,650 starts. In 2020, which saw 5,050 starters go to the post at Santa Anita, there were no fatalities on the dirt track and six on the turf surfaces. Averaging race fatalities for the number of starts per 1,000 starters, Santa Anita averaged .12 racing fatalities in 2020 and 3.01 in 2019. Averaging removes track closures due to COVID-19 and fires as criteria for the decrease. Also, the "death count" was reduced not by "more than half" but by almost two-thirds in racing fatalities in 2020 as compared to 2019. The numbers are conclusive: Safety protocols—and safety protocols alone—account for the reduction.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/517636f8e4b0cb4f8c8697ba/1614168160216-ZKX0BETIBU8P7PBBVWUG/Grandstand_morning.jpg)
