Page 6 - Equine Matters - Spring 2011

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W O R M I N G
Veterinary Surgeon
Julian Rishworth
XLVets Practice
Minster EquineVeterinary
Clinic, York
5
EQUINE MATTERS
Everyone in the horse industry has become
too over-reliant on the use of anthelmintics
(wormers) as the treatment of choice for
controlling worms in our horse population.
The drugs we have had available have been
a pretty efficient way of removing worms from
the horse, however, when you keep attacking
a worm population with highly effective
products over a long period of time you
pressurise that worm population to produce
resistance to those products.
We are now at that stage where resistance to
the worming medications we have available
is becoming more and more common. It is not
the worming products that are getting weaker;
it is the worm population that is becoming
stronger. The other problem we have is that
there are not lots of new chemicals being
developed that can help deal with these
resistant members of the worm population.
It is not total doom and gloom and there are
still things we can all do to improve the way
we manage the worm burdens in our horses
and at the same time ensure that we can
extend the effective useful period of the drugs
we currently have available.
A modern approach to
worming horses
Like the action required to arrest the problems with global warming, we all have
a fair idea that it is important, we all would like to do our bit to help but actually
doing everything we should do is more difficult to achieve in real life. Worming
horses has become such an integral part of the keeping of horses that horse owners
have become very entrenched in their own traditional methods of worm control.
Julian Rishworth BVetMed, MRCVS