The Moredun Institute, in conjunction with the Equine Grass Sickness Fund (EGSF), is reinvigorating the search for the agent that causes Equine Grass Sickness.
Last week, over two days, we hosted a series of talks entitled ‘Working together to solve Equine Grass Sickness’ at Rossdales Equine Hospital. The talks were aimed respectively at horse owners, stud managers and vets. Researchers Dr Beth Wells and Professor Lee Innes from The Moredun Institute, together with Kate Thomson and Anne Logan from EGSF, discussed the Equine Grass Sickness (EGS) Biobank research project and exciting new approaches towards finding the cause of this devastating disease. They were joined on Thursday by Dr Richard Newton and Abigail McGlennon from Equine Infectious Disease Surveillance (EIDS) who spoke at the talks for stud managers and vets.
The EGS Biobank research project is exploring all possible causal agents, including pasture toxins, organisms present in the horse’s gastrointestinal tract and investigating the different effects of weather systems and the horse microbiome amongst other things. It is collating case reports, biological and environmental samples and it is likely that the key to the disease will lie in these samples, so the biobank in critical to research progress. The aim of the research is to try to predict when grass sickness cases are more likely to occur and to be able to prevent them.
All vets and owners are encouraged to get involved in reporting any possible cases to the EGS Biobank and by donating samples that are pre-mortem, post-mortem and environmental.
Find out more about the Equine Grass Sickness Biobank here.
Thanks to Dengie, who sponsored the talks, and to The British Horse Society who are generously funding the Grass Sickness Biobank project and working with Moredun and EGSF to highlight this important research.