mud fever, and what to do if you've got it.

...this is a mud fever post...

........ a one-stop shop, let's beat it once and for all.

TCJ blog's most popular posts are all the mud fever ones (all year round), and ragwort advice. 

Tom and Henry are of course, in at night still, so they have hours with dry feet, this helps.

*It doesn't just happen in the muddy conditions of winter, Henry had it after a wet summer, as you can clearly see from the photo above. 

*don't be ashamed to ask for help, call your vet, I did, and my vet was brilliant, we couldn't have gotten through it without her help. your vet will give you pain killers and anti-biotics to fight it from the inside, whilst the creams fight it from the outside.

*ignore stupid advice from yard types who think they know everything, it's mostly passed along bad advice, and treatments have changed so significantly in the last few years your vet with have creams most people won't have even heard of.

*be super-vigilant, catch the small scabs and treat them before anything serious occurs.

*mud fever can cause terrible swelling resulting in incapacity, terrible lameness and pain.

*Wash the area thoroughly, use a diluted soloution of water/hibiscrub to pick the scabs completely off.  wear gloves, and disspose of them afterward.

 


*Without rinsing the hibiscrub away, dry the area completely.  The vet advised me to use throw-away blue paper roll to dry it, and not a towel as I had been using.  mud fever is contagious, and you need to be clean, work clean and throw everything away afterwards.

*Once dry, add a light coating of fuciderm cream, again wear gloves for this and throw them away after.  lay a dressing over the area, and hope your horse is as good as Henry here, not tied up, just standing and waiting for me to finish.

*Wrap the whole area in vetwrap, black is the correct colour for the season.  be careful not to make it too tight, your horse will need to move in it.

*Make a neat job, it'll be more comfortable that way.

*Slide the hoof-boot on.

*If your horse, like Henry, had secondary infection which casues the leg to swell, that's what your vet will give you equipalazone for, bandage the leg too.

*Fuciderm cream, it has a picture of a dog on the box, but trust me, it really works.  get it from your vet.

*Hoof-boots, very handy indeed.

*Above, after a week treatment, it's sore, but the vet told me to leave it alone unless a large amount of scabs returned, which they didn't. Henry was on anti-biotoics, bute and fuciderm cream. then after two weeks no cream, no anti-biotics, no bute.

 CHECKLIST:

• check the pasterns ever day, even the smallest scab can be very painful.
• clean the area with lots of water or if you can, stand your horses foot in a bucket of water to soften the scab.
• wear rubber gloves, the sort of thing you see at crime scenes on the telly.  mud fever is contagious, you don't want to spread it from one leg to another, or to another horse either. throw everything away afterwards.
• add a cap-full of pink hibiscrub to a 100 parts water, it's weak, that's what you want. wash the area, use this to help remove the scabs.
•  pick the scabs completely off, be gentle it'll hurt your horse.  be patient with him, he'll be in pain. if the scabs are many CALL THE VET.
• this part is important:  use disposable blue-roll to absolutely and completely dry the area.  you can throw it away. 
• give your horse an hug and a handful of well-deserved treats.
• once dry, put more gloves on and add a little cream from the vet to the area.
• add equipalazone or equibutazone to his dinner, alongside anti-biotics, and breakfast, usually for about three days. that's why calling the vet is important, it'll only last for weeks longer if you don't.
•  then, if your horse is going out, put a clean gauze over the area, with gamgee over that, held in place with vet wrap.
• and use hoof-boots, I promise you, once you get some, there'll be no going back, they're brilliant.  

LESSONS LEARNED:

• CALL THE VET, IT'LL SAVE YOU TIME AND YOUR HORSE PAIN IN THE LONG RUN, the mud fever infection will be treated from within with drugs, and without with cream and barrier methods.

Henry's pastern after three weeks:

 

TCJp31 Mud Fever (it's horrible) Part One

MUD FEVER:  It's very nasty....

Mud fever is a general term for a skin infection around the heels and pastern of a horse and is caused by an infectious agent called dermatophilus congolensis, which loves muddy wet conditions.

The infection can stay dormant in the skin, becoming active when the skin is compromised in some way, usually by prolonged wetting, but as it turns out also the abrasive nature of snow. Spores germinate to produce hyphae (threadlike tentacles) that penetrate into the living skin and spread in all directions from the original site. The result is an acute inflammatory reaction.

Often the disease is made worse by a secondary infection. Classically there will be serum oozing from the skin, causing the hairs to stick together. There are often crusty scabs on the skin surface that, if pulled off, will reveal a greeny-yellow pus with the protruding hair resembling paint brushes.

Mud fever can be extremely painful to touch, especially if secondary infection is present, but is rarely itchy. Frequently more than one limb is affected.

In severe cases, the whole limb may swell up and a secondary lymphangitis can develop. This is serious and requires intensive veterinary treatment usually including both antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and pain killers such as bute.



Luckily, when your horse gets it, there's lots of things you can do and lots of helpful advice:  here I have tried to summarise all the key points for a one-stop treatment advice blog.


Lemmy & Edie.

Min, making sure I've bandaged Henry's
leg properly.  She's a tough audience.

.......but help is at-hand in the form of Louisa the vet, John the husband, Jenny, who looks after Tom & Henry whilst I'm away and several cats....here's how the story unfolded.....

Henry, he likes to eat the snow.

The snow might look light and fluffy, and the boys enjoy nothing better than frolicking about in it, BUT it's actually quite abrasive.  And any little crack, cut or scab is quickly scratched away, so take care....hoof-boots at the ready.  Of course it's all very well to say this in retrospect, but that's why this is an important new post: MUD FEVER.

Tom and Henry both have little scabs of mud fever on their back heels coming out of winter.  It doesn't cause them any trouble, I just leave it alone.  It disappears in the warmer weather and I give it no thought.

BUT:

...this strategy turned out to be a mistake, and it turned out the snow was to blame.

Henry's mud fever became infected, it was a Saturday morning, and in a single night  his leg swelled  up to a hard puffiness from the knee to the pastern.  He could hardly put any weight on it at all...naturally I was very worried, and as I was due to fly to Delhi the next day...the chances were increasingly likely I wasn't going anywhere.

CALL THE VET IMMEDIATELY:

I hadn't encountered mud fever before so was at a loss to diagnose an infection, instead I assumed...because it was Henry...he'd twisted his fetlock running about (not uncommon), and sprained his ankle so to speak.   But as the vet began to inspect Henry's leg it was clear this was not your usual type of infliction.  She instead told me his mud fever had caused this swelling, I had no idea such a small scab could cause my beloved Henry so much pain.  So, here's what I did:

Firstly the vet gave me bute and anti-biotics for 5 days.  Because it was an infection and not a tendon injury I could cold hose the area every day to cool the swelling, with tendons as you know, only the first day of swelling is effected by hosing.  BUT: we were 10cm's deep in snow that Saturday so any kind of hosing was impossible.

Lemmy showing the deep snow

The vet suggested it was the abrasion of the snow that likely caused the infection to begin in the first place, rubbing the surface of the skin as Henry moved about and allowing the nasty bacteria that causes mud fever to enter his system.

Out came the cool-boots, they are so very handy, soak them for an hour in cold water, and keep them immersed in cold water for the duration of need.  And they just wrap neatly around the whole area from above the knee to the coronet band. Stretchy Velcro straps make them very easy to use.  And when every pipe and hose is frozen, and you don't want to add to the slippery conditions by using water in your yard - the cool-boots are brilliant.

Tom & Henry are very good at being fiddled about with.  even the vet knows this so she just carries on prodding Henry as he stands still, head- collarless in the yard.  They always stand still  for me.

When the cool-boot came off, I half filled a shallow rubber feed bucket with warm water with table salt splashed in it.  Henry stood with his foot in the water while I gently picked off the tiny area of mud fever scabs, leaving the red-raw skin underneath clean.

I then dried the whole leg thoroughly with a clean towel, dabbed a tiny glob of wound cream onto the area, layed a dressing over the back of his heel.  wrapped his whole foot in vetwrap (black of course), and on top of that a hoof-boot.

A nice stretchy leg bandage then went on to keep any reduction of the swelling caused by the cool-bandage down.  I wrapped it from under the knee to above the fetlock.

This enabled Henry to carry on his usual routine of wandering about, and as the bute kicked in he was able to move quite freely around his field with Tom.  getting steadily better every day.

The next day I repeated the same drill.  Dried his leg thoroughly - this is VERY important, keep the area dry, and when possible get the healing air to it quickly. This time I layed the dressing over his heel without any cream.  I knew the dressing would keep the area clean and dry, and the vetwrap would keep it in place and also prevent the hoof-boot rubbing the sore heel.  The hoof-boot went back on.

After 3 days of this the hoof was completely free of accessories.  Cleaned and dried we simply smeared the heel in udder-cream twice a day for turn-out.  By Friday night his legs were warm but clean and free of swelling, by Saturday morning his legs were back to being Henry's usual skinny, hardly any heat and Henry was moving completely normally again.  The vet was right, in a week Henry was almost back to normal.  But a lesson was learned, don't leave even small matters unattended, because small things can often turn into big ones.




I am keeping his foot dry, because the field is very wet, so the boot will be on for a week or so with the dry dressing layed over the heel at the back.as photo above.

At night, the boot and dressing come off to let the air to the area, and i shut them in the yard over night.  So Henry can stay in dry clean conditions whilst he's heel heals.

Be vigilant always, the next time I see some mud fever scabs, I'll look after them.  Do all the steps above, wash/dry/dressing/vetwrap/hoof-boot until the skin is pale and clean, smeared in pink udder cream and back to normal in no time, I wont take any chances.

Of course all this extra attention and the boys being good has meant their diets have gone by the wayside for a week, obvious thank-you for being good treats have been readily available and administered, but we're starting again this week.

Henry is fine now thank goodness and Tom just looks on in disapproval, he of course very rarely needs to have any first aid done to him, and he'll be damned if he'll let me anywhere near him with PINK cream!!!!!

Louisa the vet tells me that it could take as long as 3 weeks before Henry's leg is completely back to his usual super skinny (lucky Henry), already it's reducing every day, and the more he exercises it, the better.

Edie, she can't bear Henry's pink heels either but I suffer form terrible dermatitis this time of year, as do lots of us horsey types, and a few days of smearing Henry's heels with udder cream, has all but cleared it right up, I'll tell Vogue...best cream 2012!

TCJp23 Equipment Update: First Aid

FIRST AID:
...things you need to know

Where effective first aid is concerned you can't bee too prepared or too careful.

You don't want to be hosing your horses arterial blood off the yard floor before you come up with a practical first aid strategy (like I did), make a plan now.

I have a Brownie badge in First Aid too, so feel I am suitably qualified!!

I have a fully stocked, comprehensive First Aid kit in my feed room, and a phone in there with my vet and farrier on speed-dial.  I have a bigger supply of vet wrap than my saddlery, because being prepared for emergencies is vital, you could save your horse significant down-time if you have all the right stuff immediately to hand.

I have a 'quick kit', a bag of essential things I need to dress most cuts and wounds.  I can just grab it and everything I need to bandage a wound is right there.  This has been used several times, It really is a great idea.

'Quick Kit' First Aid Kit: In the kit I have the following:

• gamgee
• cotton wool sheets
• scissors
• gauze cloth
• wound cream
• vet wrap
• gaffa tape
• bandage tape (to secure the ends of bandages where necessary)
• first aid spray
• hoof shaped poultice sheets
• hoof pick

For example, don't wait until you really need to work an emergency situation before you learn your horse doesn't like his leg hosed, or he wont stand still for you to bandage his leg.

Tom has just had a bath, it's a great way to get your horse to enjoy being hosed....do it when it's really hot, and he'll love it!

If your horse really MUST be kept in with an injury, remember he'll need at least 18 hours of fibre (hay or haylage) to eat in a 24hour period.  and keeping a buddy near-by can help tremendously with keeping stress levels to a minimum.

PRACTISE

I treat every little cut like it was a big-deal, so I can practise bandaging and hosing.  Not just to speed up my response and better my technique, but to get the boys used to all the fiddling about, to a point where it becomes a casual affair, mine will stand still in the yard, no head collar, whilst I fix a bandage etc on.

In the summer, when it's hot, your horse might enjoy, like my 2 do, a cold hose on the legs.  This is a great time to get him used to being hosed when he can relax because it feels good.  Then when you need to hose for an injury, and you're panicking and flapping about, he will be the calm one!

BANDAGING:

Some bandaging for first aid can be fiddly, so prepare for this.  Get you horse used to the mechanics of the job of first aid.  

Cotton wool sheets over the dressing with vet wrap over the top and secured with some tape (my vet did the bottom one, you can tell because I will only buy black vet wrap, Tom & Henry are very style-conscious even with an injury).

LEG WOUNDS:

Cleaning: which could be cold hosing for quite a while until you're certain the wound is clean, or wiping with a clean flannel.  It can be useful if your horse sustained a  minor cut earlier in the day to clean it with a flannel, rubbing gently until the wound bleeds again, this can help clean the wound further, but only do this if you've watched your vet do it and you can copy his technique.  Drying the wound, and applying a wound cream or similar preparation, we all have our own favourite things that work best for us (I like a giant tube of cream).

Dressing: This is when I use a human-grade first aid gauze layer in between the freshly cleaned wound and the bandage.  I lay a piece of the fabric over the wound, cut to size when necessary, it can be helpful to stop the wound blood sticking to the bandage.

Bandage: Vet Wrap, I love this stuff, it sticks to itself so it's much less fiddly to apply.  Rehearse using these too because there is a degree of tolerance in the level of stretch.  You don't want to apply too tight, or too loose, it needs some practise.

Stable Bandages: If the boys are in for the night, i'll swap any protective outdoors boot for stable bandages, these are fleece and stretchy, they can keep your bandage and leg protected and warm, and are easy to get on.

Boots: Invariably my 2 are turned out.  So putting boots over the bandage, and on the leg on the other side too, helps keep the bandage in place and adds extra protection.  Have a variety of brushing, tendon and specialist turn-out boots in your inventory, you never know what type you may need.  Try to buy ones that are machine washable too.

Protective Indoor Boots: I have indoor quilted boots too which cover the leg from the knee to below the fetlock.  If I have wet the leg for and injury (hosing or cleaning) and it's cold, these are a great thing tom use after towel drying the area, it keeps the leg warm (always put a matching one on the opposite leg), and allows it to dry too.

TENDON INJURIES:

I never approach a tendon injury without veterinary consultation.

For tendon injuries remember only 20 minutes of cold-hosing is effective in bringing down swelling.  It can also keep you occupied with a real job while you wait for the vet to arrive. Do this at least twice a day as your vet advises, OR buy your kit 'cold bandages', they are amazing, I fully recommend them: Aerborn Coolsport.   I keep an old plastic biscuit tin specially for this:  soak the bandage in water, in the tin, in the fridge so it's cold until the gel in the bandage swells.  They attach to the leg with long elastic Velcro straps, they are very easy to put on.  Which is handy if you've got a fidgety horse!  Leave them on for 20 minutes, and it gets the job done, you can do other things in the yard and saves water too. 

These cool boots are brilliant, I recommend every horse owner has a set,

they are easy to use and you can get on with other yard duties while they work.  with a hose you'd have to stand there for ages, boring for you, but more importantly, very boring for your horse. xx

Your horse may have to be stable bound (box rest) for a period of time, listen to your vet, but also use your judgement. 

When Henry has had tendon injuries (always a nutty field-related, shoe at the end of a 4metre skid type-thing), I have approached his box rest strategy in the same way. 

I have kept him and Tom indoors for as few days as possible (usually just 1). 

Then Henry stays in for the second day and Tom gets the yard and his box to wander about in. 

Then day 3 Tom goes out into the field that joins the yard only and Henry gets the yard and stables.  Keeping them close keeps them happy and Henry can move at liberty without being moved along by Tom. 

Henry, confined to the yard so he heals.  Tom is very near by and my land it arranged so there's nowhere he can go where Henry cant see him.

This can last a few days, then John builds a special tiny coral with electric fencing out into Tom's field. Henry gets a bit of rolling and grazing done, but in a very tight restricted area, so there's no possible chance of him leaping around and re-injuring himself, perhaps I should say, there's less chance....Henry doesn't need much room! 

Then the vet comes back, and gives him the all-clear to be turned out.  I am never in a hurry to ride, so Henry gets all the convalescence he needs. 

During this period Steve, my farrier has also called by to put on a special shoe which gives some relief to the injured area, and makes Henry sound enough to be turned out finally.

Remember farriers know everything about feet, and can make special emergency shoes to suit an injured horse, even help relieve a tendon injury.

Being prepared and practised means you skill levels rise, and the time it takes to apply a tricky dressing and bandage gets quicker each time.  If your horse gets a wound in a tricky place, you'll be more confident to tackle it, and your horse will be happy to stand still while you do it too.

You could ask your vet if they run a first-aid course, then you could learn about how to tackle on a few different scenarios.