MVS Equine staff had a fantastic evening watching our sponsored race at Cambridge Raceway last night. A great atmosphere enjoyed by all!
⭐️Take a sneak peek into our fabulous brand new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit!⭐️
With the foaling season well under way we have settled into our new custom built NICU building. The unit consists of 4 mare and foal boxes where we are able to accomodate both sick foals and mares. Each box has it's own padded foal pen for recumbent foals with facilities to perform oxygen and fluid therapy, parenteral nutrition, blood pressure monitoring, blood gas analysis and on-site laboratory services. Neonatal Intensive Care is one of the many emergency and critical care services in full swing. Staffed 24/7 with a team of vets, nurses, support staff, these patients are in the best hands
Itchy throat?
The owner of this horse noticed she was less interested in her dinner compared to normal and that she was making a little noise when breathing.
One of our ambulatory vets attended the horse and noticed a slight trickle of hemorrhagic nasal discharge. An endoscopic examination of the upper airway was performed on farm and a piece of wood/bush was seen wedged between the left arytenoid and the aryepiglottic fold.
The horse was transported to the clinic for further examination and treatment. Under standing sedation and after application of local anaesthetic one of our surgeons removed an approximate 20 cm long blackberry branch which was caught by the windpipe as the filly was trying to swallow the branch into her esophagus.
The horse is expected to make a full recovery from this unusual injury.
We love it when hard work pays off. This little chap unfortunately lost his mum during foaling but a foster mare was found the following day and as you can see he's doing well.
You may be wondering why has he got a feeding tube while he has a mum to drink from? While the foster mare is a great source of milk and will educate the foal well, one vital element she cannot provide though is collostrum.
The mares' placenta doesn't allow many antibodies to be passed on to the unborn foal. Therefore, foals are born without a good defence mechanism against pathogens. To be able to fight pathogens in the first 3 months of life and to stimmulate the immune system, the foal fully depends on colostrum (first milk produced after foaling) from the mare.
To ensure adequate transfer of antibodies via the colostrum it is important that the foal drinks enough, high quality colostrum within the first 24 hours of life. Quality of colostrum can be checked with a BRIX refractometer, > 23% on the BRIX scale is good.
A healthy foal is nursing within two hours of being born and nurses frequently. Do contact us if your foal doesn't reach these milestones, or if your mare has poor quality colostrum, we can tube-feed the foal with your (stored)colostrum which is essential for the foals' health. After 24 hours of birth the foal is no longer able to absorb antibodies through the intestinal wall and intravenous infusion of plasma is the only way to provide the foal with antibodies to fight pathogens.
To make sure your foal has absorbed enough antibodies, measurement of IgG in blood once the foal is 24 hours is old is the best test available. Foals with an IgG < 800 mg/dL are prone to sepsis and require plasma, therefore we do take and process IgG bloods during level 4; you will get same day results from our in-house laboratory.
To reduce the need of plasma, create your own colostrum bank: test the quality of colostrum from your mare, and once the foal has had the first drink 200-250 ml can
