The recent outbreaks of equine flu across the country has been a wake-up call for all horse keepers as to the importance of good hygiene and of course, vaccination. We are working with the Animal Health Trust on horse diseases.

Here at the Horse Trust we take this very seriously and provide funds for important research projects to help us understand how disease is transmitted, and what we can do to reduce its spread. Not only equine flu but other diseases which are normally present in the UK, such as equine herpes virus and strangles.

Our work with the Animal Health Trust into a new process to understand how strangles is transmitted is starting to generate results by combining information from specialist laboratory and veterinary networks.

We can now collect new and insightful data regarding veterinary approaches to diagnosing strangles, as well as mapping where strangles is occurring. In 2018, there were a total of 284 laboratory diagnoses of strangles from samples submitted by 108 veterinary practices.

We can now start to understand where the hotspots are, and where we all need to focus our efforts to keep horses safe.