Tack Box Talk
Tack Box Talk
EHM Outbreak of 2025: The story of lessons learned
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Dr. AJ Manship, DVM, DACVIM, at Oklahoma State University College of Veterinary Medicine, shares his personal experience with the EHM outbreak in 2025. We discuss how EHV can manifest as EHM and best practices for prevention.
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Kris Hiney: Welcome to Extension Horses Tack Box Talk Series, Horse Stories with a Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Kris Hiney with Oklahoma State University, and today we're going to be taking a retrospective look at the recent EHM outbreak that we had last
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Kris Hiney: November, December, down here in the South.
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Kris Hiney: So, to speak about what happened, and kind of some insights gathered, I've invited Dr. AJ Manship, who is one of the veterinarians that works at the College of Veterinary Medicine here at OSU. So, welcome, Dr. Manship!
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A.J. Manship: Thank you. Happy to be here.
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Kris Hiney: So you actually did treat some of these horses during this last outbreak, correct?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, I was, you know, it was kind of ….
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A.J. Manship: I don't know if I actually got to talk to you about this, but I was on clinics, and it was a fairly¦ it's usually a fairly quiet time around here, and all of a sudden, you know, I think it was about 1PM, I started¦ my phone just started ringing off the hook, from people in¦ like, I had old classmates.
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A.J. Manship: Down in Texas, I got some calls from some other clinics, I got calls from clients, all in the span of, you know, a couple hours, and I was like, oh no. That's, you know, you just know, kind of, then at that point, like.
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A.J. Manship: whatever happens, it's gonna be¦ it's gonna be kind of a big deal, at least regionally. But, you know, fairly quickly, we started moving some things around to try to get set up.
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A.J. Manship: to be able to help if we could. So, yeah, it was kind of a like I said, sleepy, like, it was near Thanksgiving, and then this, all of a sudden, it all kind of broke loose.
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Kris Hiney: So, and I know, everybody¦ well, not everybody, but those in the horse industry in the U.S. all heard about this, but really, it was pretty centered in Texas, Oklahoma, kind of down here in the South, correct?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, that's my understanding. I mean, there was a few horses that were in Texas, I think, that traveled to Louisiana, to LSU, because of lack of¦ I mean, I think in Texas, they were pretty hard hit as far as
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A.J. Manship: availability, initially, of appropriate quarantine facilities and things like that, as were we at the time, like, we had to clear out some horses from our, you know, more standard isolation, horses. We had to clear them out to some separate facilities that required a little bit less strict.
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A.J. Manship: isolation.
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A.J. Manship: And so, you know, I think that was predominantly where it was. Initially. There was a couple horses, I think, that got caught, traveling. I mean, not caught, but, you know, they were they were traveling, to the west, and I think there was a couple in Arizona, or here and there, I can't really remember now, but I would say predominantly really centered in
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A.J. Manship: you know, all across Texas, and then sort of central, maybe, central, south-central Oklahoma is where a lot of them were.
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Kris Hiney: Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and ask you about the biology as sort of a backup, everybody. So, so when we were talking about this outbreak, so EHM is just kind of a version of EHV, so maybe you want to go through our letters and.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah.
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Kris Hiney: It's all about, okay, are these separate, are they the same?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, so, you know, EHV, we'll start there, is the causative agent of EHM, and so EHV is equine herpes virus, and when we say EHV, sort of in the veterinary profession, predominantly.
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A.J. Manship: The big scary one that we're always talking about is EHV1, so it's equine herpes virus 1. There's several equine herpes viruses. EHV1, 2, 4, 5, and 3 are probably the most common ones that we talk about.
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A.J. Manship: And they all have, sort of, their own little,
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A.J. Manship: You know, kind of variation on clinical disease that they cause.
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A.J. Manship: really, each one each V1 predominantly causes, like, respiratory disease, upper respiratory tract infection, cough, fever, nasal discharge, that kind of thing. But it is associated as well with, abortion in mares and EHM, and EHM is sort of a manifestation of
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A.J. Manship: you know, I don't maybe not more severe isn't the I think it is more severe for those horses, but it's sort of this, you know, a word we use often is, like, sequela.
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A.J. Manship: To sort of a more typical EHV1, infection.
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A.J. Manship: And EHM is Equine Herpes myelencephalopathy, and it is
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A.J. Manship: you know, it's, what can happen is the horses will often be exposed, and these horses are, you know, it's kind of a ubiquitous virus. You know, I would think of it more like a, you know, like a common cold in most cases.
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A.J. Manship: It's really kind of prominent in young horses in particular, so, like, weanlings, to yearlings, to those horses that are going out to training often, or, you know, maybe they've been on a sort of semi-quarantine farm up until that point, and then they, you know, they go to a place to get
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A.J. Manship: Get some training hours, and they'll get exposed to 30 or 40 other horses of a similar age, or slightly older that maybe are traveling. And so those are the ones where we tend to see it, sort of most frequently, and that's when you tend to see sort of the most severe manifestation of respiratory disease.
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A.J. Manship: You know, herpes viruses,
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A.J. Manship: are viruses that can integrate themselves into the,you know, think chickenpox, I guess, would be a good,
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Kris Hiney: Once you have it well, herpes, right? Yeah, herpes, herpes.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, I mean, herpes simplex in humans, obviously, you know, it's everybody makes the joke, it's for life, and it's true, often. You know, it can integrate into your own cellular DNA, and it can go latent, in horses tends to go latent in the trigeminal ganglia, so it's a cranial nerve in the face.
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A.J. Manship: Kind of like, you know, again, chicken pox, when it goes latent in your spinal nerves, and you can get the remanifestation of shingles.
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A.J. Manship: We don't always have sort of that clear-cut remanifestation in older age in horses, but often older horses that have been infected at a younger age can kind of silently shed this virus.
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A.J. Manship: During times of stress. So, you know, late gestational mares, horses that have had, you know, some other kind of disease that kind of knocks their immune system, or they have a big, profound stress, they can they can, get viral recrudescence and shed it, and often they won't necessarily show signs, and so they can act as a
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A.J. Manship: you know, as a reservoir for it, sort of in the population. But it, you know, it is out there circulating pretty commonly. I mean, again, you know, we could try to eliminate the common cold virus, but, I mean, you know, it's just one of those things. So
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A.J. Manship: And what tends to happen with these horses, you know, is they'll get the sort of standard respiratory tract infection, or may or may not actually always have respiratory signs prior to it.
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A.J. Manship: Often they will, but generally they'll have a fever, and we call the fever associated with equine herpes virus a biphasic fever, and so often they'll have, you know, a brief period of elevated body temperature, they may start looking crummy, feeling crummy, their temp will come down, maybe they'll get a dose of banamine, or maybe it'll come down on their own.
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A.J. Manship: And, you know, maybe they're still a little sluggish, not quite right, or maybe they're still looking kind of sick, and then around 2-4 days later, they're gonna spike another fever, and then often they'll have, respiratory signs at that point.
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A.J. Manship: And then typically, after that, the way that the neurologic disease is called is the virus itself actually, enters some of the white blood cells and then starts circulating systemically.
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A.J. Manship: And when it does that, it can get deposited in these other places. So, herpes, in particular, really likes to infect the epithelial cells of the upper respiratory tract. We call it epithelotropic.
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A.J. Manship: But
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A.J. Manship: but it can get into the bloodstream and then infect areas where there's high degrees of perfusion. So, think the blood-brain barrier, where the, you know, the body kind of protects the brain from all this perfusion. The brain needs a lot of blood, so it sends a lot of blood there, but it's got these special tight junctions
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A.J. Manship: that keep normal stuff from getting through there. Well.
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A.J. Manship: When that virus gets there, it can actually infect the endothelial cells that make up the blood vessels, and then you get inflammation there locally.
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A.J. Manship: And that's how you get neurologic disease. And it kind of functions in a very similar way when it causes abortions in mares. It'll go and attack that placenta, and the endothelium of the placenta, and it'll cause inflammation there.
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A.J. Manship: And so that's that's where you actually get the signs, and when you get that, that inflammation can lead to, you know, sort of locally, increased, rates of thrombosis and things like that, or,
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A.J. Manship: And just inflammation in general, and then you get actually malacia or degradation of the spinal cord in those areas, to some degree.
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Kris Hiney: So the million dollar question is if, and if you knew the answer, you'd probably be famous, right?
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Kris Hiney: But if EHV is this prolific, this many horses have it, if they're stressed, they shut it.
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Kris Hiney: Why does it sometimes tip over into the neurologic part?
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A.J. Manship: Great, yeah, great question. You know, I don't know, personally. I mean, there's there's people have proposed sort of a lot of mechanisms.
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A.J. Manship: you know
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A.J. Manship: anything that could increase the risk of viremia, so if there's more virus in the blood, you know, obviously there's more chance, you know, why does it do that?
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A.J. Manship: that's the tougher question, you know? There was, not too long ago, as people have gotten sort of more into
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A.J. Manship: PCR testing and some of the molecular testing, looking at DNA and stuff of viruses and other things, you know, they kind of identified what they called a neurotrophic form of the virus, and they kind of thought, hey, you know what? The virus gets in there, and there's some instances of this in other viruses and other species.
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A.J. Manship: You know, it gets into the body, and, you know, you get sort of this point mutation, in the body, and then they think, like, hey, this is what's gonna cause that to really, target that neurologic tissue and cause this disease.
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A.J. Manship: And that just hasn't hold true.
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Kris Hiney: I remember when that was a thing.
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A.J. Manship: Right?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, and you know, a lot of diagnostic labs still, you know, still comment, like, hey, this they'll look for that point mutation, because that is what they're looking for. There's a point mutation in what we call the so-called, like, neurotropic form of this virus.
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A.J. Manship: And they'll look for that, and they'll report, like, this is neurotropic or it's non-neurotropic, right? But what they found is, like, you'll you can get EHM with any of them at relatively similar rates, you know? And so, I think it's kind of back to the drawing board, as far as
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A.J. Manship: you know, what exactly You know, I think the potential, you know, the more it's circulating in general within the population, probably the increased risk, just from a proportional sense.
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Kris Hiney: You know? Yeah.
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A.J. Manship: And so, that's why, you know, as far as
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A.J. Manship: targeting ways to prevent it. It's, like, really trying to trying to get that circulating virus within the population down as low as we can.
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A.J. Manship: You know.
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Kris Hiney: So is there any knowledge as to why is it relative to the horse's immune system? Like, why, they would have higher viremia? Because that would be the greater spreaders, right, or the more load, but what actually controls the is that viral strain, or is it the horse itself that
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A.J. Manship: It's probably a both, honestly. It's probably a mixture of both. You've got some hosts, and you've got some pathogen factors that, can lead to that.
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A.J. Manship: Would be my guess. Again, you know, they've documented some risk factors for the development of,
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A.J. Manship: of EHM in sort of various outbreaks, it's also difficult to kind of reproduce, a lot of times, the disease experimentally, and so it can make it, it can make it tricky to study and figure out, you know, what are those, what are the risk factors and what are the things that are, you know, sort of
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A.J. Manship: Triggering to, like, triggering for this, you know, and
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A.J. Manship: some of the things that they've reported is, like, previous CHV1 vaccination, actually, in some of these outbreaks. You know, there's lots of proposed mechanisms for why that might be. In some of these outbreaks, they've reported that mares were at higher risk for developing EHM.
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A.J. Manship: among some other things, age, I think, also is one of the ones that they've reported.
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A.J. Manship: But it kind of varies from outbreak to outbreak, and that's, you know, that's what a lot of times when we have these outbreaks, people kind of take the opportunity to to try and
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A.J. Manship: you know, get as much information as we can. And unfortunately, you know, with
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A.J. Manship: With the way the equine industry has been, sort of more recently, like, these sort of national, you know, national travel for a lot of these shows, international travel for a lot of these shows, you know.
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A.J. Manship: Unfortunately, there's been a fair number of outbreaks in the last, you know, 10-15 years to kind of get some information. It's just not always the best information, you know, because you got a lot of you just got a lot of stuff to sort through in a natural outbreak situation.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah. And you've also, I think, alluded to that there may be a seasonal component to this as well?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, I mean, it's hard, because it can be, you know, I would say in sort of natural disease, we tend to see more of the virus sort of in that cold, what you would consider the cold season, so the cooler months, winter and or, like, fall, winter. The virus,
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A.J. Manship: is relatively, sensitive to, like, environmental desiccation and temperature, and so, you know, cooler temps, moisture air can potentiate the spread, and then obviously, just like us.
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A.J. Manship: In the winter and fall, like, horses tend to get close together, either because people are bringing them into barns, or because they're getting close together in the pastures.
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A.J. Manship: The other thing that plays in, though, is obviously, like, show seasons.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah, big fraternity.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Kris Hiney: All the major events.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, so
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, show seasons obviously play in, quite a bit, you know, and you may see more of this in different disciplines at different times of the year, because they don't always, you know, they don't always have their big events at the same time, you know? But, you know, in this instance, right, like, sort of end of the year.
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A.J. Manship: in the run-up to NFR, and not even NFR for all of those people, but just, you know, big money events, big, big opportunities for competition and showcase, like.
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A.J. Manship: there's gonna be a lot more horses traveling a lot further, and coming to the same spot. And so, I think that's certainly something to consider, as well. And then, you know, and then throw on top of that the environmental factors of milder temps and moisture air, like
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A.J. Manship: You know, you kind of end up in the
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Kris Hiney: Well, and you said stress was a risk factor, and guess what's gonna stress horses, right? Ridding all day, travel long distance, trailer rides, like, all of that is is a pretty good crack at the immune system, right?
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A.J. Manship: For sure, and you know, a lot of those people are in that in that time of year, you know, they're hitting
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A.J. Manship: at least an event weekly, you know? If not
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A.J. Manship: If not more, depending, so
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, I think all of that, certainly comes in,
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A.J. Manship: comes into play there at that point. Especially, you know, they may be, you know, some of these girls were or girls some of these ladies and gentlemen were probably in
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A.J. Manship: you know, who knows? They were in Utah, they were in Colorado, they were in Arizona, and then they're in New Mexico, and then, you know, here we've got some people coming from Louisiana, Arkansas, wherever, Missouri, and then they're all together in Texas, and
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Kris Hiney: Yeah.
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A.J. Manship: And then it's just a perfect storm. So, you know, who was patient zero? I don't know, there may have been more than one, there's no telling. You know?
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Kris Hiney: Right. And I think, you know, to talk about the disease and try not to, you know, lay blame on anybody, because you said that horses can shed when they're asymptomatic, so it's so, like, it's not like somebody brought a sick horse to the horse show.
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A.J. Manship: I would bet I would bet that that is not the case, to be honest. Or not an obviously, you know, not an obviously sick horse. I would I would most certainly bet that that was not the case. You know, these horses
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A.J. Manship: And it's tricky, too, because, you know, a lot of these none of these vaccines are labeled specifically for prevention of even the respiratory disease. You know, they're really their label claims are to reduce
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A.J. Manship: Clinical signs and shedding, or is what they kind of most of the label claims are around, right?
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A.J. Manship: And so what that tends to mean is those horses have much milder disease,
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A.J. Manship: They do tend to shed at lower rates, but again, if you've got close exposure and you dump a bunch of other, like, stress factors and things like that on top of that.
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A.J. Manship: you know, does that make as much of a difference as we'd like? Probably not, you know? And so my guess is, you had a horse that was
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A.J. Manship: And we talk about these horses often having fevers. Well, those fevers can be really short-lived, particularly in, you know, and even in some of the cases we saw, they never appreciated a fever, before those horses presented here.
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A.J. Manship: With signs of neurologic disease. And it's probably because those horses were vaccinated and older. Not old, but older. And so
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A.J. Manship: You know, my guess is whoever brought it in had no idea.
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A.J. Manship: You know.
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A.J. Manship: And honestly, even given the and given the sort of nature of the that biphasic fever, you know, often that first fever is short-lived and really mild.
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A.J. Manship: You know, maybe the horse, maybe he only finished 3 quarters of his hay one night, and that, you know, that was all they saw. And then the next day, looked pretty normal. So that, you know, what happens? They haul.
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A.J. Manship: a couple days to get to this show, and, you know, maybe he or she, you know, I don't know, again.
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A.J. Manship: who this patient zero was, but maybe whoever got there at the show started acting kind of crummy, or maybe they didn't at that point, you know, is the honest truth. And they and may have never even been one of the ones that developed neurologic disease, but could have been the one that would start the initial shedding.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah.
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Kris Hiney: Now, you said something there, and I'm going to let you walk through all of this very carefully, right? Because we want to make sure everybody gets the right message. So, about vaccination.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah.
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Kris Hiney: Because you did say, like, oh, they might have identified that it's a risk factor, but my guess is you're not going to tell us
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Kris Hiney: Just
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, no. Yeah, so that I think most of that, that may have been shown in a couple, and it's like a very it's sort of in the realm of, you know, there maybe there's some evidence, you know?
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A.J. Manship: The other thing you gotta think about in this is, like, confounders, right? And, like, which horses have probably been vaccinated for EHV1 before, and it's those horses that are at the highest risk, right?
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A.J. Manship: And so, you know, make of that what you will.
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A.J. Manship: But, you know, in particular, the one that comes to mind for me is there's a description of an outbreak in Spain from, like, I think 2015 or something like that, where they sort of really first put that forward.
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A.J. Manship: the bottom line is, again, you know, as far as control, of the disease, just EHV1, respiratory disease, but also EHV, or EHM, like, you know, if we can reduce viral shedding.
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A.J. Manship: in the population writ large, we're gonna be better off. And so, one of the ways that we could do that is through vaccination, for sure. And so, the recommendation, you know, in an acute outbreak, you know, they're not always they're not going to tell you to vaccinate them necessarily.
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A.J. Manship: again, depending on jurisdictions and things like that, they'll do some different things, but horses that had direct exposure, the recommendation is not to vaccinate them during an ongoing outbreak, but the recommendation from AAP and, like, BEVA, which is the British Equine Veterinary Association.
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A.J. Manship: And even some even, honestly, some show, associations, like FEI requires CHV vaccination, for,
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A.J. Manship: showing at their sanctioned events. So the recommendation still, for sure, is horses that are at high risk, so those that have these, biosecurity risks and exposures that show, young horses.
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A.J. Manship: Those are the horses that need to be vaccinated. It is still considered a risk-based vaccine by the AAP, meaning that, you know, not every horse needs it.
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A.J. Manship: But those horses that have those big risk factors should still get it, if that makes sense.
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Kris Hiney: Yep, and so we'll be very clear about our recommendations here. So, horses that are at risk should be vaccinated. I'll ask you about the frequency here in a second.
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Kris Hiney: But what you're talking about, about in the face, like, if there's an outbreak, you're exposed, you don't vaccinate essentially after the fact, because that could be problematic.
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A.J. Manship: Not if they've had yeah, especially if you think they've had, like, a direct exposure. That's the big that's sort of the caveat that they put in there. You know, in some of these places.
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A.J. Manship: where they've had, you know, say they have a barn, where they've kind of localized it to, and then there's another barn on the opposite end of the show ground, and there's really low risk of direct exposure. You know, there have been instances where they do vaccinate this other barn while they're quarantining in place.
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A.J. Manship: But those horses that are in that one barn, they're not going to vaccinate. Does that make sense?
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Kris Hiney: Yes, yes.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, and that and that is generally what gets
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A.J. Manship: is the general recommendation throughout throughout all of this, as far as best as I can as best as I've seen, and that's what I generally recommend, if you
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Kris Hiney: But if you if you live in Oklahoma, and you heard about, like, oh, they're having an outbreak, but you have not been anywhere, you are still okay.
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A.J. Manship: For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to be honest, even if you, like, say, even if you are if you live in Oklahoma, and you have a dressage horse, and you go to a dressage show, but there's this outbreak in Western performance horses, like, again, your risk is probably the same as it was before that, do you know what I mean?
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A.J. Manship: So it's not to say that it's
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Kris Hiney: We don't talk to each other much.
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A.J. Manship: Not a lot, you know, not generally, not generally, you know, there's probably the there are some, I'm sure, some exceptions there, but in general, you know, there's not a lot of crossover in those two disciplines. So, you know, the risk is not zero, but it's probably not any greater than it was before that.
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Kris Hiney: Right, right. Okay, so for our at-risk courses, give us the lowdown. How frequently should we be dialing them up?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, so, again, I mentioned, like, the FEI requiring, they have some pretty specific requirements for entry into show, and they're a little complicated, I don't remember totally off the top of my head, but it's like, they want them to be vaccinated, at least, I think.
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A.J. Manship: 30 days Prior to any show, and not more than 120 days, or something like that.
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A.J. Manship: Don't quote me, I have not been,
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A.J. Manship: But it's something like that. So, roughly, you know, what is that? 120 days is, like, roughly every 4 months. I think that's for animals at really high risk, right? Sort of animals with moderate risk, most people will recommend 2 to 3 times a year.
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A.J. Manship: Generally. It kind of depends on the age of your horse, to some degree.
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A.J. Manship: And what your and, like, what your show schedule and show load look like, you know what I mean?
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A.J. Manship: And so that's where most of the conversation is, and that's what that's kind of what, AEP recommends as well. I mean, generally, the recommendation is follow the manufacturer's vaccine labels. They've done some studies looking at how long the immunity lasts, and honestly, even immunity from natural infection only lasts about 3 to 4 months, and so
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A.J. Manship: that's probably where most of our vaccines will hit, which is where those recommendations come from for the FBI.
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A.J. Manship: So again, you know, does every horse that goes to a show need it for, like, 3 times, or 4 times a year?
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A.J. Manship: Probably not, no. You want to try to time it to where you're gonna have
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A.J. Manship: Antibodies sort of peak.
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A.J. Manship: coming into your show season, and then if you're in your show season, and you're going to kind of get towards that point where they start to wane, so that four to six months range, you want to revaccinate them. And so, if a horse has seen a vaccine, or has had a disease or anything like that, they can, you know, typically what they're mounting is called an annestic response. So they've seen it before, and the body will remember it when it gets exposed to those pathogens again.
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A.J. Manship: And so you get a response, and you get production of antibodies within about, 2 weeks or so. So, you know, when we're talking about doing that, like.
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A.J. Manship: you know, the time to vaccinate a horse for herpes is not the day before you're gonna haul it to a big show. It's probably 2 weeks, or maybe even 3 weeks before you go to that big show. Does that make sense?
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Kris Hiney: Yeah, absolutely.
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A.J. Manship: And, because you're trying to time it in such a way that you get sort of the maximal protection that that vaccine provides as you're coming into its big risk window.
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Kris Hiney: Now, I have another vaccine-related question kind of scenario. I know, just from some research some colleagues have done, we know that, veterinary care does start to drop off in our retired horse populations.
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Kris Hiney: But it's not like there's a whole bunch of retirement homes for horses. So typically, those guys still live, right, on premises with some of the show horses, so
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Kris Hiney: Now I have a retired horse, he's not going to the horse show, but I still go play horse show. Do I need to vaccinate him?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a that's kind of a case-by-case thing. A lot of times, like, I will still vaccinate those horses, especially it depends on the age of the horses, I would say, that are sort of coming in and out of those places. You know.
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A.J. Manship: I feel like as people age, in a lot of cases, their horses tend to age with them, and so, you know, you may have this older well, you know, clearly, I guess that's not that's not a profound observation, but, like, you know what I mean, like, as you start to slow down, like, you're not as inclined to go jump on that
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A.J. Manship: 3, 4, 5 year old, and go do the same stuff you might have done when you were 20, when you're getting up into your 40s and 50s, right? You just don't bounce quite as good. And so, you know, like, I think looking at that, it's you gotta kind of take a holistic look with your vet. I mean, I have certainly vaccinated,
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A.J. Manship: Long-retired horses,
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A.J. Manship: for people that have had, you know, that still are very active and have young horses, or, you know, if there's breeding going on on the farm, stuff like that, or if you're traveling to a, you know, to a stud farm or anything like that, like, you know, those things all increase the risk, and, you know, one of the risk factors for EHM is,
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A.J. Manship: is age. You know, is the vaccine gonna prevent it?
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A.J. Manship: you know, probably not, but maybe can it help prevent that horse from getting sick? It may, or it may make him not as sick if he gets it. And so, certainly, you can, but if you're at the point where
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A.J. Manship: You know, you go show maybe 2, 3, 4 times a year, and it's kind of spread out, and your horse that you're showing's older than 10, and you've got a couple of old, you know, 20-year-old guys hanging out in the other pasture.
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A.J. Manship: do you need to vaccinate those ones? You know, probably not. It just depends. I mean, that's a conversation you have to have with your vet, because it all depends, too, on how you house. Do they all live in the same pasture? Da-da-da-da-da, you know? And I think the biggest thing at the end of the day
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A.J. Manship: In those situations, you may be more effective in doing sort of a little self-quarantine at home, when you bring your show horse home, you know? If you've got the space and you've got the means, it's probably a little bit easier. And that's not always feasible if you're really active, but if, you know, if you're in sort of a
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A.J. Manship: you know, it's sort of a mild to moderate competition level, that you may be more effective doing that. Whereas
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A.J. Manship: If you're still blowing and going 24-7, and you've got those old guys around, you know, finding the right,
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A.J. Manship: Finding the right place for that retired horse in in your
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A.J. Manship: in your place can make a big difference, but I certainly don't rule out vaccination for those older guys.
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Kris Hiney: Okay, so after having, looked through our little panic of I mean, lots of people were panicking, I don't know if you wanted to speak about that, were we justifiably panicked, or I mean, for the people whose horses were sick, like, we understood this was a big deal.
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, big deal, you know, horses did not make it, right? Like, there's certainly several horses, that did not make it. I mean, I do think,
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A.J. Manship: I do think it was a sort of a, you know, it was a reasonable panic? I don't know if that's a thing, but, you know, I think there was reason for people to be very nervous and very concerned, right? Like, this is something, that I've seen
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A.J. Manship: and this is probably based on where I kind of have been at in my career, as far as training, but, you know, I've seen a lot of it in the English performance, world, and that's probably just regionally where I was.
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A.J. Manship: But something like that in the Western performance horses, like plus, like you say, all the things that are going on and all the crossover between, you know, because it was
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A.J. Manship: well, it's these, you know, it's these, barrel horses. Well, but then there's also the AQHA show going on, but there's also you know what I mean? So it just had potential at the time to get out well outside of
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A.J. Manship: you know, where it is. Often these are kind of outbreaks that are
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A.J. Manship: you know, when I say local, they can be local to a discipline in a region or in a nation, right? Or even internationally. But, you know, this one had potential to jump across several of those, so I think it was a very reasonable thing to be concerned.
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A.J. Manship: You know, I as far as, like, you know, I and I think it was a very, you know, there was there was a lot of horses affected, even
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A.J. Manship: whether they were sick, whether there was potential that they were sick and they lost out on some, different things, like, there was a pretty big impact, I would say. So, you know, and I think
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A.J. Manship: just like anything, I think social media, I think it helped in some ways, and I think it didn't help in some ways, you know? Like, I think there was some really good stuff put out there by some, really good people, and then there was
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A.J. Manship: you know, there's a lot of stuff that we probably could have done without.
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A.J. Manship: But, you know, I think it was a reasonable time, I think just because of the potential to jump across, and then, you know, running up to, NFR, which is where, you know, at least some of these horses were
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A.J. Manship: pointed towards, like, again, you're gonna come out of barrel horses, and then you're talking about the
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A.J. Manship: World Series of Team Roping, you've got another big barrel event in Vegas, you've got the NFR, and so you've got all those other horses, right? Like, I think the potential for it to get well outside of what it was in.
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A.J. Manship: was there, and so I think that's very worrisome.
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Kris Hiney: But we survived, right?
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A.J. Manship: We did. Yeah, I think a lot of hard work from people all over the place, people in Texas, people in Oklahoma, you know, Betts in
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A.J. Manship: you know, the mixed animal bat in Kansas who ran down and nasal swabbed his neighbor's horse, even though he hadn't touched a horse in a
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A.J. Manship: a long time, you know, that was a story that I had. We had a lady that we were, you know, she was self-quarantining on the farm and managing a mild case, and her neighbor was a veterinarian, and her other, her regular veterinarian was had traveled.
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A.J. Manship: For the I was actually, I think, traveling for the NFR, potentially. I can't remember now exactly what the story was there, but, you know, she didn't have anybody, didn't have any materials, and, you know, she called her neighbor, who lived a mile down the road, who was a cow vet, for the most part, did some small animal.
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A.J. Manship: They came down, swabbed her horse, and she drove us down some samples and kind of got everything lined out. So I think a lot of people did a lot of really hard work to keep it from getting outside and keep
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A.J. Manship: you know, keep horses, going, and keep the industry going in general. So I think it was I think it was, that was a pretty good moment to watch.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah, yeah.
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Kris Hiney: So, for you, what was the biggest lesson you learned from from all of this past experience, right? Because we're lifelong learners, so
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, you know, I think,
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A.J. Manship: That's a hard one, you know? I think,
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A.J. Manship: I think the big thing I learned, I think, goes to the fact that a lot of people coming together can get a bunch of good stuff done. You know, I think
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A.J. Manship: it just reiterates, and, you know, I don't know that I learned this, but I think it was something that really
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A.J. Manship: that it definitely reinforced for me is, like, you know, I'm kind of the, hospital biosecurity,
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A.J. Manship: self-appointed, if you will, guy that goes around and tells everybody to put gloves on, and, you know, go through the foot bath, and wear your boots, you know, wear your boot covers, do this sort of thing, and I think it just reiterated, you know, the
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A.J. Manship: the importance, you know, the critical importance of that kind of stuff, and I think it highlighted, you know, probably we as veterinarians in general need to do a better job about talking to our clients. You know, it's and when I say that, I don't mean to say that vets don't tell people to quarantine their horses, but I think going through and physically telling them
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A.J. Manship: Or showing them, or creating a plan with them.
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A.J. Manship: On how to implement a really good biosecurity plan for their place, you know, for their show.
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A.J. Manship: setup, all of that is really critical, and I think that's a place where we can,
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A.J. Manship: you know, we can probably do a better job as veterinarians, in general. And I think people are willing to I think the other thing I learned is people's willingness to hear it, and do the best they can, right? You can tell them the perfect scenario that they can do, and it's not always feasible, whether it's personnel or facility or whatever.
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A.J. Manship: But people are hungry, I think, for that kind of information, because they don't want that stuff to happen.
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A.J. Manship: I think, I think that's one thing, that it just Brought that importance back.
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A.J. Manship: To me.
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Kris Hiney: Well, good! I mean, I know we do a lot of trying to, in the extension world, of teaching about biosecurity, so sometimes the best time to do those lessons are when everybody's still a little nervous before
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, you know, and it's one of those we tell the students all the time, it's like, you can create a plan, but if you don't remember it, or you don't remember what your plan is, or you don't live by it all the time, I mean, that's the thing, you can't I mean, it's super important to do it when there's something like that going on, but, you know, and not all of it is
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A.J. Manship: super onerous and super time-consuming, but if there's just, like, there's little things you can do that can make a big difference for your for your place. You know, it may not change everybody outside, but you can make a big difference on your place.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah.
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Kris Hiney: Alright, well, I really appreciate your time, today, Dr. Manichev, and hopefully this is the last go-round of this for a few years, right?
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A.J. Manship: Yeah, hopefully.
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Kris Hiney: Wish it on a different part of the country next time.
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A.J. Manship: Sure, for sure.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah.
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A.J. Manship: Alright.
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Kris Hiney: Well, excited to have you here on our podcast, and we'll put any information, additional links in the show notes, but this has been another edition of our Tack Box Talk, Course Stories with a Purpose.
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A.J. Manship: Thank you.