Week 2 at SVEC

My second week at Saginaw Valley Equine Clinic ended up being quite tiring thanks to a Hanoverian Colt born last Sunday on Mother’s Day.  His dam had dripped milk for well over a week so we had already assumed her colostrum was probably poor quality (ie. lacking in the antibodies that are needed to protect the foal from infection for the first several months of life), and the IgG test we ran on Monday confirmed our fears.  He only had 400 mg/dL and it should be over 800 mg/dL.  So, Monday afternoon we gave him hyperimmune plasma and all seemed well.  That is until Tuesday morning when we came in and he had very watery diarrhea.  It truly amazed me how fast foals can go down hill.  Despite closely monitoring him, he started to crash around noon.  The entire clinic staff, including the barn and office workers jumped in to help and we were able to stabilize the foal. 

While waiting for the culture results to come back, Dr. Jones instituted intensive medical management including fluids supplemented with vitamins and dextrose, antibiotics to cover all possible types of bacteria (Naxcel, Amikacin, and Metronidazole), probiotics, and a product called bio-sponge to help dry up the diarrhea.  We also muzzled the foal so he couldn’t nurse in order to rest his gut.  By the evening, he was already starting to make good progress.  By the next morning he was doing so well, we were already beginning to introduce milk by allowing him to nurse for 15 sec every two hours and then eventually upping that to 30 sec and 1 min before removing the muzzle and allowing him to nurse free choice again the next day.  Of course, while the foal was only nursing a limited amount, we had to nurse the mare every two hours as well to keep her comfortable.

The culture results came back positive for 3 types of clostridium, so the foal is still on antibiotics, but because he no longer has any diarrhea, all other treatments have been stopped.  Now that the foal has had several days of doing great, I think we can safely say he has beat this infection, at least for now.  However, we are very concerned that this infection ever occurred as it is highly contagious to other foals and we have a barn full of mare and foals!  Luckily, most of the other foals are older and are only at the clinic so the mares can be rebred and we were also able to get the sick foal into isolation right away and follow protocols to prevent the spread of the infection to others.  We will see what the next week brings for this little, well, actually quite big guy!