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  Discussion on Venereal Disease?
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Posted on Thursday, Apr 29, 1999 - 1:59 am:

We recently had a mare bred (last week) and now the stud has some raw ulcerated lesions on his penis and is unwilling to breed. She also has some lesions around the vulva. I suspect this to be Equine herpes 3 or Coital Xanthema but my text books don't go into the long term on this disease. The plan is to lay the stallion off for 3 weeks and I know he'll be fine but what about the mare?
She could take a little longer to get over this as it can remain in the clitoral fossa for some time. We purchased her about 6 months ago and she was supposedly a maiden mare. She has been at our place pastured with mares only so where did it come from? Because it's a herpes virus, I suppose it could be passed with respiratory secretions but no one was noticably ill except a yearling quarentined 20 feet away with pneumonia. He could be the culprit but I just can't find the literature. Just wondering if we need to worry about this next year with this mare and hopefully she settled with the last breeding so we don't have to stress about her reinfecting the stud.

Posted on Thursday, Apr 29, 1999 - 5:58 pm:

Hello Doc,
There is a real paucity of good research on EHV-3 and seems to be limited to clinical observations. The text books all refer to other test books as references.

There is no mention of any longer recovery for the mare and the litereature says they both remain chronically infected with occasional eruptions occuring, form here on out(?) similar to genital herpes in humans. Interestngly other clinical reports also have trouble pinpointing the source of infection and a chronically infected mare is assumed to be the source.

Serology may help you determine the chronic carrier: Serological responses to this infection include the production of complement-fixing and serum-neutralizing antibodies which reach maximum levels 14 to 21 days after infection. Complement-fixing antibodies decline rapidly and are usually not detectable by 60 days after infection, whereas serum-neutralizing antibody activity is maintained for at least 1 year. This disparity provides a useful method for the diagnosis of recent infections and estimation of the temporal incidence of infection in groups of mares. It seems likely that clinically normal carrier mares spread the virus on studs where the disease has previously not occurred.

Considering the chronicity of the problem it may be useful to take impression smears of freshly ruptured vesicles and have them stained for nuclear inclusion bodies, apparently this is a easy way to positively diagnose this disease.

Lastly, if you just found erosions without the vesicles, is it possible during breeding some tail hairs got in the way during coitus causing abraisons. I have had this happen myself.
DrO
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