An Australian medical issue - liver damage

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Festive_Felicitations

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This is a link to a post on an Australian horse forum (Cyberhorse), it is not pleasant and quite sad.
But I thought the HHO brains might find it interesting as a problem and as an idea of problems faced by horse owners here in the 'outback' and possibly (hopefully) have some brilliant suggestions.

http://forum.cyberhorse.com.au/forums/showthread.php?t=79202

In CR as well.
 
That sounds awful, sorry can't help much at all though. Your plants are so different from ours and some of the illnesses horses get over there are so different to what ours get here. I've never heard of Birdsville walking disease.

We do get horses dying from plant toxins, and death occurs from liver disease. Our main concern here is a weed called Ragwort. The horses don't eat it when it's in flower but it become more palatable when it's died off. There are certain laws now where farmers and councils have to treat their paddocks to get rid of the stuff, but I still see it everywhere.

The ragwort causes liver damage but over a lengthy time. The damage caused by this plant is irreversible. Some signs of severe liver damage are 'head pressing, mania and bizarre behaviour so it sounds like that's what is happening to your horses.
 
liver fluke is what springs to my mind. it can be passed around by slugs/snails (the slime) and it's also common in sheep and cattle but apparently rarer in horses.

my horse had it a few years ago. i moved him to a new field and unbeknown to me at the time it was once used as a slug farm.
literally overnight he started to age drastically, lost his appetite and would just stand by the gate looking 'lost'. after a few blood tests and then a liver biopsy it was proven to be liver fluke.

he was injected with something (can't remember what it's called now) and after a couple of weeks i saw the difference in him, he started to look younger again and he perked up, we also moved him off the paddock as soon as he had the injection.

i was speaking to a farmer a couple of months ago and he was telling me about how when he was at college he had to disect a cows liver, it had liver fluke and he said he cut the liver open and all the fluke came out, apparently they were about the size of a 1pence piece and they penetrate the liver by eating away at it.

my horse still has liver damage but obviously we don't know to what extent.

don't know if that helps or not though!
 
Janey - we don't have much Ragwort, but alot of a common relative 'fireweed' (both from the Senecio genus). I think one of the posts asks about it and its dismissed as not present. As it tends to florish after fire/drought not rain - hence the name.
Also I think only Australia could come up with a name like 'Birdsville Walking Disease' :)

r_h - I will post about liver fluke worm, I think they are willing to look at anything.

Thanks for the ideas though - will pass everything on.
 
also if you've had alot of rain recently then it will 'spread' the fluke further afield.

there's lots of information on the internet about liver fluke. like i said it's not common in horses and there are few vets (might be different now) that accept liver fluke in horses, 3yrs ago i had 3 different vets examine my horse and do tests, 2 of them were completely stumped and walked my field for the whole day to see if there was anything in there that could have poisoned him. there wasn't.

the third vet saw alot of slime from the slugs/snails by the gate and just looked at it, he took some more blood and rang me the next night saying he thinks he knows what it is but wouldn't tell me until he ran a few more tests on the blood, he got back to me and said he wanted to do a liver biopsy to confirm his thoughts. my horse showed to have alot of damage to his liver from the fluke and the vet thought that my horse had at least 35% liver damage.

all this took about 17 days to sort out and 'solve'. my horse went grey in the face overnight and he looked 'gaunt', by the time he had his injection against the fluke he was fairly grey all over, 2 weeks after the injection and moving to a different field the grey had faded and his coat had a shine to it again.

seriously though it's worth getting blood tests done and even liver biopsy.
 
My Shetland gelding became unwell in April this year, he dropped a lot of weight and was a lot quieter than usual, vet came out and took blood to test. Result was that he had suffered a 'liver insult' and needed to be admitted to the clinic for a biopsy. He went in, had his biopsy and I was told he had significant liver damage but that it was not caused by ragwort or any other type of poisoning, he had had a hepatitis-like infection and he had anything between two months and two years to live.
Sick pony went onto antibiotics and lactulose twice a day and improved so much he was pretty much back to his old self, mugging people in the field etc, vet said he would re-test him in July to see if his liver had begun to recover. At the end of June, a few hours after I had given him his meds, my pony went into respiratory distress, vet came out and said it was the end stage of the liver disease. In the hour it took to stabilise his breathing, he went blind and was wandering in circles, pressing his head into the walls. He was put to sleep.
My point is that everyone assumes he died as a result of ragwort/ other plant poisoning, which is an obvious cause of liver damage but he had an infection, whether viral or bacterial will never be known, the infection was long gone before the damage became evident.
I hope a cause and a solution is found for these horses, infection is another avenue to explore.
 
i hope the horses will be fine
its been a year long battle with my mare she had hepatitis anmd at several points her outcome looked poor, she under went 3 liver biopsys but we never found a cause, she lost weight got colics etc and was very poorly but now her bloods are improving
we tried antiboitics and steroids and no improvement so she went on Hepatosyl Capsules and a human blood pressure tablet to try and open her vessles out to try and get her liver functioning as a last resort and now her bloods are improving and nearly back to a normal range as her protein was throught the roof when she was first ill, im really luck as we think she on the mend

would def test for liver fluke and get a liver biopsy done as a biopsy should be able to tell you if its a toxin and what toxin
 
i hope the horses will be fine
its been a year long battle with my mare she had hepatitis anmd at several points her outcome looked poor, she under went 3 liver biopsys but we never found a cause, she lost weight got colics etc and was very poorly but now her bloods are improving
we tried antiboitics and steroids and no improvement so she went on Hepatosyl Capsules and a human blood pressure tablet to try and open her vessles out to try and get her liver functioning as a last resort and now her bloods are improving and nearly back to a normal range as her protein was throught the roof when she was first ill, im really luck as we think she on the mend

would def test for liver fluke and get a liver biopsy done as a biopsy should be able to tell you if its a toxin and what toxin
 
Milk thistle and Global Herbs Restore are supposed to help to support the liver, although whether they'd be any use under such extreme circumstances I don't know. Hope they find out what is causing the problem, it must be terrible to be so helpless. :(
 
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