Liver Fluke

SuperH

SuperH

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Our dairy herd has just been diagnosed with liver fluke. All the cattle will be treated for this later on this week.

I have two ponies grazing the same fields, my question is are they likely to have picked it up and if they have what symptoms would they have and what is the usual treatment? I will be asking the vet when she comes but would be interested to hear from anyone who has had liver fluke in horses before then.

Thanks.
 
I had a horse dosed for liver fluke, after it had been turned out on some very "flukey" ground with sheep, that I didn't realise at the time. He was 4, and started to drink copious amounts of water and didn't seem 100% but nothing obvious. Vet came and examined him, couldn't find anything too wrong, but took a look round where he was kept and dosed him with cattle and sheep wormer. "This isn't licenced for horses" he said, but it is the same stuff and much cheaper!

Horse was fine afterwards and had no further problems, but I didn't turn him back out onto the same pasture. He had been sent away for breaking, and it was the YO who rang me up and said she was a bit concerned about him, and she would send him back until he was better.
 
You may well not see anything odd about your ponies. Mine looked fine, when their bloods were giving a very different picture.

Horses are known for shedding very few eggs per gram of poo. Can be as low as 0.1egg/gram of poo, so can be difficult to confirm infection by faecal egg count. This is in contrast to cattle who may have several hundred eggs per gram of poo, and I believe sheep can have into the thousands of eggs per gram of poo.

So if you chose to have a faeal egg count done specifically for liver fluke, it may or may not show up any fluke eggs. If it didn't show any up, you still wouldn't know whether the ponies had a fluke infection or note.

So given their grazing alongside animals known to have fluke, I'd be wanting to dose them with Fasinex anyway.

Out of 12 poo samples tested for fluke last year, when my ponies had raised liver enzymes, only 1 sample came back with fluke in it. 1 egg in 3 grams of poo. That was enough for me to go ahead and dose all the ponies with Fasinex.

A blood test for liver enzymes should reveal whether the fluke have caused any damage (or rather, it will show if there's any liver damage, but it won't prove what caused the damage).

David Sutton at Glasgow University talked with my vet about it. DS apparently has a particular interest in liver fluke in horses, and is seeing more of it in recent years.

There is no licensed treatment for liver fluke in horses, so the only treatment option open is to dose them with a product unlicensed for horses.

Fasinex, triclabendazole, is the preferred treatment for sheep, cattle or horses because it is effective over a greater part of the fluke's life cycle than other flukicides.

I had to have a vet prescription to have Fasinex (as I don't have sheep or cattle for whom the product is licensed).

One of the liver enzymes, GGT, went from 2,300 pre-Fasinex down to about 670 a month after dosing with Fasinex. Over the next few months the GGT returned to normal (less than 45).

David Sutton's recommendation was to dose once, and then repeat two weeks later.

I tried to dose with a syringe into the mouth, but Fasinex is a thin milky liquid and it went everywhere EXCEPT into the pony. So I then tried just mixing it well with a tasty feed (my usual 500g of feed balancer and a large handful of chaff) and all the ponies wolfed it down no problems.

Sarah
 
That's a really useful and informative post fff, I've always thought liver fluke in horses was not taken seriously enough and good to hear David Sutton is working on it. I have only ever had one fluke egg in my horse a few years ago. His last test came back 'no eggs seen' but had my sheep tested at the same time and they had none either. I'm about to ask my vet for some more Fasinex and want to know if that will treat tapeworm in the horse too (save giving a dose for each). Do you know how often David recommends treating, I like to do autumn and spring but really not sure if this it too often or not enough - my sheep get supaverm - I know someone who uses this for their horse but don't think this treats all stages of fluke so I'm sticking with Fasinex.
 
I'm afraid I don't know how often DS recommends treating.

Last year I read up as much as I reasonably could and came to the conclusion that I would be guided by blood tests, and if my ponies' liver enzymes were up again, then I'd dose with Fasinex again, but that I wouldn't do so if liver enzymes were normal. But then I'm not grazing cattle or sheep here, so didn't have to factor that in.

There is an increasing problem with resistance to triclabendazole apparently, so it's a fine balance between worming enough to be effective but not so often that resistance builds.

This is a link to a really interesting presentation on liver fluke: http://www.scops.org.uk/content/Proceedings-of-Liver-Fluke-Workshop-August-2012.pdf

I'm sorry, I don't know whether Fasinex treats tapeworm.

Sarah
 
Thanks, I'll take a look. I worry about resistance too. We are in a typical fluke area and my horse, like some others I know, didn't do very well last winter and also failed to put on weight as they would normally in the spring/early summer. A dose of Fasinex seemed to sort it. I have a general blood test every summer when he's vaccinated and nothing unusual showed with the liver enzymes. I might get an ELISA test done this year - same sort of thing that they do for tapeworm but specific to fluke.
 
sueonmull who does the ELISA test for liverfluke and is it actually for horses? Fasinex does not treat tapeworm, large or small redworm, large roundworm, pinworm, bots or stomach worms, just fluke.
My horses had liverfluke this year, they were all looking very well until they foaled then lost weight quite quickly after foaling which is very unusual for them, and it happened one by one as they foaled between March and end of May. They mostly lost weight over their ribs and could not regain it, they all sweated a great deal in that hot weather we had, some were lethargic, all tired easily if they galloped up the field, one was very footy, another had bad hives. Their foals were not affected. Bloods showed they were anaemic with raised fibrinogen but normal WBC, normal liver enzymes and normal albumin. One did have slightly raised liver enzymes as in one over normal. Worm counts were negative and all of them had had equest in Feb and ivermectin on foaling. Vet said it was easier to treat for liverfluke than test for it so i dosed all but one with fasinex, they all ate it in there feeds even the fussy ones. After 10 days they all just looked slightly better whereas the untreated one looked worse, so she was treated and the others all had a second dose at 14 days. It took nearly 8 weeks for them to regain the weight but they did and all look okay now. I dosed all my other horses as well after as they must of all had them but the mares only looked so bad because they had come under stress foaling. I haven't dosed them again since but i'm thinking i probably should. The ground is wet here and was grazed by cattle and sheep 25 years ago but not since, but my haylage comes from a farmer who has told me he has a liverfluke problem on his farm. Liverfluke can apparently survive in wet haylage.
 
This is a really interesting post. I get my wormers from the vet, and they include an annual egg count. I will ask them about liver fluke when they come to do the flu jabs, as this year they have advised that all the cattle get wormed for fluke, even if this is not a normal thing for this farm, just due to the wet weather.

Thanks for the information.
 
Silverfire, I assume the vet would send the blood test off for the ELISA test in the same way they would do a similar test for tapeworm, I thought I'd read somewhere that it would work for a horse but would ask the vet first anyway. Having said that I'd feel happier (and it would be much cheaper) just to give him a dose of Fasinex. He was really struggling with his weight before we dosed him in the spring and it did take a long while to put it back on - at 26 I did wonder if he ever would but, fingers crossed, he's looking fine now. Don't want to go through all that again. My sheep get a different type of wormer altogether so hopefully there won't be any resistance issues.
Be interested to hear what your vet says Orangehorse
 
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