Wormscope

27/06/2024

🐴🌟 Raising Awareness: Sand Colic in Horses 🌟🐴

Today, let's talk about sand colic — a condition that every horse owner should be aware of. Sand colic occurs when horses ingest sand or dirt, which accumulates in their intestines and can lead to severe discomfort, colic, and even life-threatening blockages. ⚠️

🚩 What Are the Signs of Sand Colic?
🔘Diarrhea or loose stools
🔘Lethargy and loss of appetite
🔘Abdominal discomfort or rolling
🔘Weight loss or poor condition
🔘Repeated mild colic episodes

🕵️‍♂️ Detecting Sand Colic:
Did you know that F***l Egg Counts (FECs) can help in detecting sand colic? While traditionally used to monitor parasite loads, FECs can also reveal the presence of sand in your horse's digestive tract.

💡 Prevention and Management
Feed Horses Off the Ground: Use feeders or mats to reduce ingestion of sand.
Regularly Check Pastures and Paddocks: Ensure they are free from excess sand.
Provide Psyllium: Adding psyllium to your horse's diet can help move sand through their digestive system.
Raising awareness can help prevent and manage this condition, ensuring our equine friends stay happy and healthy! 🐴💖

Feel free to share this post to spread the word about sand colic. Together, we can make a difference! 🙌

27/05/2024

Winter is approaching, making it the perfect time to target bots in your horse's stomach. In summer, botflies lay their eggs on the horse's forelegs. When the horse licks its legs, the larvae are ingested and migrate through the mouth to the stomach, where they stay over winter. These larvae attach to the stomach wall and feed during the colder months, developing into botflies in the spring. Administering a mectin-based dewormer in winter will kill the bot larvae in your horse’s stomach, reducing the number of adult botflies in the warmer months.

Each horse's health and susceptibility to parasites can vary, so individualised management is essential. Regularly perform faecal egg counts (FECs) to assess the effectiveness of your deworming program and detect any resistance issues.

Contact us now to make a booking, time slots filling fast!

Dropping locations Cessnock and Morisset

10/04/2024

Our recommended Autumn de-wormer after the first frosts, new to the market!
ULTIMUM® Long Acting Horse Wormer and Boticide Gel
A broad spectrum horse worming gel which contains the active ingredient Moxidectin, a second generation macrocyclic lactone and Praziquantel, a synthetic isoquinoline-pyrazine derivative.
For treatment and control of:
🪱tapeworm
🪱large strongyles
🪱small strongyles
🪱pinworms
🪱ascarids
🪱hair-worms
🪱intestinal threadworms
🪱stomach worms
🪱bots
🪱cutaneous onchocerciasis

For more information https://au.virbac.com/ultimum

13/03/2024

The most important parasites we need to address going into the Autumn/Winter are encysted small redworm larvae and tapeworm. Neither of these two parasites can be detected from a faecal worm egg count and encysted larvae are not killed by most wormers.

Tapeworms can cause digestive disturbances, loss of condition and colic if a horse develops a large burden of worms.
Small redworm larvae can encyst within your horse’s gut wall throughout the year -especially in the autumn and winter. If the larvae are not treated, a sudden mass emergence of larvae can occur in the spring, damaging the gut, which can cause diarrhea and colic and may be fatal.

Why is a targeted worming program important?
Because of the increasing resistance to the active ingredients used in wormers.
So that we do not deworm our horses when it is unnecessary to do so, which is better for our horses and decreases the risk of resistance.

So that we can target the right worms at the right time of the year.
Encysted redworm larvae are treated using a wormer containing moxidectin, which also treats redworm and bots, which is why it’s not necessary to carry out a faecal worm egg count at this time of year. The dewormer should be administered late in the grazing season (people often use the first frost as a reminder) so that reinfection on the pasture is minimised.

23/01/2024

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Cheers
Richelle

11/12/2023

💩 Test and only deworm high shedders 💩

Ask us about our FEC loyalty card, every 10th test is FREE!!!

Drop off locations
➡️Cessnock
➡️Morisset

Send us a pm to schedule a time 😊

04/08/2023

When it comes to deworming, horses fall into two categories.

High shedders & low shedders.
This can be identified by doing a f***l egg count to see how your horses are responding to your deworming program.

High shedders have a really big egg load. While low shedders have a really low f***l egg count.
Each horse type needs to be treated differently with a unique deworming program.

“We need to be a little bit smarter about how we deworm our horses so that we don’t develop drug resistance on our own properties.”

This myth is FALSE!

17/05/2023

14/03/2023

Sunday mornings look like this at Wormscope 🪱🧐

08/03/2023

**Important points**
👉Perform autumn worming after the first frost
👉Frost kills bot flies
👉Moxidectin kills bot larvae
👉Worming after the first frost keeps horses bot-free until the following season

Equest Gel plus Tape is our recommended wormer for Autumn 😊

07/12/2022

Faecal Egg Counting (FEC)
December is TEST or WORM

$15 per horse, send me a pm to organise

Drop off locations Cessnock and Morisset.

26/10/2022

Those little red or brown worms floating around in your water troughs, do you really know what they are??
They are midge fly larvae, some people mistake them for red worm (small strongyles) or blood worms (large strongyles) and worm their horses which is totally incorrect.

The larvae can be easily cleaned up by adding a few gold fish to your trough (they will love to eat the larvae) or by simply adding a trough block.

02/09/2022

It’s spring time which means everyone needs worming! Our preferred and recommended wormer for this season is Strategy T!

Wormscope is preforming FECT tests 2 weeks after you worm to check for any resistance

$15 per test, pm us for further

30/06/2022

I can't stress enough how important Faecal Egg Counts are!! Its going to be a worldwide problem if we don't change our worming practices.

https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/news/large-numbers-of-horses-will-die-if-we-do-not-change-the-way-we-worm-792731

LARGE numbers of horses will die owing to our inability to control their parasites if we do not change our worming practices. This was the warning given at a webinar on anthelmintic or wormer resistance, hosted by the Mare and Foal Sanctuary and presented by equine internal medicine specialist David...

27/05/2022

💩 𝓕𝓪𝓮𝓬𝓪𝓵 𝓔𝓰𝓰 𝓒𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓽𝓼 💩
Winter is TEST & WORM HIGH SHEDDERS
$15 per horse, send me a pm to organise sample drop off's!
Check out www.wormscope.com for more details

Schedule a test today! Servicing the Hunter Valley & Lake Macquarie NSW area's

02/03/2022

Welcome to Autumn everyone, it’s that time of year when everybody should be worming with or without FEC count results!

Equest Gel plus Tape is a great wormer for autumn and should be used at least once a year to control adult and encysted stages and benzimidazole resistant strains of small strongyles including inhibited larvae.

It also controls
Tapeworm
Large Strongyles
Small Strongyles
Pinworms
Ascarids
Hairworms
Intestinal Threadworms
Large Mouthed Stomach Worms
Stomach Bots

10/12/2021

WHAT TO DO WHEN A NEW HORSE ARRIVES

A new horse arriving on your property may contain different types of worms that your farm does not currently have, for example, the pathogenic worm Parascaris equorum (ascarids) in young horses, pinworms (Oxyuris equi) or worms that are very resistant to the wormer that is currently effective on your property. These new animals can put your current resident horses at risk and may also cause your worm control program to fail.

Any new horses arriving on your property must be treated in a way that will minimise the risk of resistant worms contaminating the pasture. Parasitologists and veterinarians recommend that the following procedures are undertaken to minimise the risk:

Quarantine Worming

• All new arrivals should be quarantined away from the resident herd for 14-21 days. This is important, not only for worming but also from a biosecurity perspective.

• New horses may be harbouring infectious disease or resistant parasites.

• Give the horse two separate worming products one after the other. The two wormers should contain:
a) Moxidectin + Praziquantel (Equest Plus Tape)
b) Oxfendazole + Pyrantel (Strategy-T)

• Collect all manure and dispose away from grazing areas. Do not spread the manure of quarantined horses onto pasture.

• A FECRT should be performed two weeks following worming to confirm efficacy of the treatment.

Quarantine is often labour intensive and inconvenient but is an essential practice to minimise the spread of infectious disease and resistant parasites.

03/12/2021

December is TEST or WORM month!!

$15 per horse, send me a pm to organise

09/09/2021

Faecal egg counts needs to be the cornerstone of your worming program and allow you to identify the low, moderate and high parasite egg shedders.

Just remember, faecal egg counts are not an indication of your horse’s worm burden, but rather the shedding status of your horse.

The high shedders are those horses who are responsible for most of the parasite eggs that are shed onto pasture. These horses are typically wormed more frequently to reduce their egg shedding, whilst those in the low to moderate group are wormed at less frequent intervals. By targeting and worming the high shedding horses, the level of infective parasites on pasture is lowered and refugia is maintained.

TEST, TEST AND TEST AGAIN!

The more faecal egg counts you perform on your herd, the better. This will allow Wormscope to characterise the nature of infection within your horses.

22/07/2021

FAECAL EGG COUNTS - $15 per horse.
This represents significant savings to every horse owner and is a worthwhile investment in your horse's health.
50-60% of horses have a natural immunity to parasites and only require deworming once or twice a year!

Contact us now for more information on collecting and submitting a sample.

Drop off locations at Cessnock and Morisset

25/06/2021

Test and worm your high shedders through July/August 👌

Drop locations Morisset or Cessnock
Pm for more details

01/03/2021

A faecal egg count can provide an insight into the type of worms in your horse.
For optimal results, a FEC should take place 14 days after worming your horse. However, you may also like to perform a FEC prior to worming to evaluate the effectiveness of your ongoing worming program is.

If used correctly, a FEC can decrease your reliance on worming treatments and extend the life of wormers used today.

Thank you to our friends at Virbac for this insight on how FEC is performed 😊

https://youtu.be/kZudmlwV8dU

Get a full insight into the process and learn how a FEC test is performed.https://au.virbac.com/3dworming