Biosecurity important in light of recent Equine Infectious Anemia outbreak

At the end of May 2025, the Equine Disease Communication Center published a document stating that from May 2024 to the end of August 2024, 22 horses were confirmed Equine Infectious Anemia positive.

These horses were all treated at Outlaw Equine Hospital in Decatur, Texas. The thing that these horses had in common was not where the originated which ranged from California to Colorado to Oklahoma to Texas, but instead that they had been hospitalized at this hospital’s intensive care unit.

Importance of biosecurity

The investigators found that these horses that were in the intensive care unit had IV catheters. The catheters were flushed with heparinized saline in multi-use bottles. The syringes were reused and the bottles were contaminated with blood.

It is never OK to reuse syringes and needles in equine veterinary medicine. In cattle, it is never OK to use a dirty needle to enter a bottle. Always use a clean needle to enter the bottle. Then according to Beef Quality Assurance standards, you can use the same needle on 10 to 15 head of cattle. Needles are never reused between herds or locations.

Equine Infectious Anemia

The Coggins test is looking for Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA). This is done annually on horses that are traveling across state lines.

This is a blood-borne, potentially fatal viral disease. It is typically spread by flies but in the above case was spread by poor biosecurity protocols.

Horses that are infected with EIA will show signs of fever, depression, anemia, muscle atrophy, muscle weakness, and spots on their mucous membranes.

There is no cure for EIA. Horses that are infected stay infected for life. Horses that are positive are typically euthanized, otherwise they have to be quarantined by themselves with very strict biosecurity protocols for the rest of their lives. The horses can never move from the original premises. That is no life for a horse, which is why owners typically choose to euthanize.

Of the 22 horses that were confirmed positive from the above EIA outbreak, 21 were euthanized.

Thoughts on the EIA outbreak

If you follow any horse pages on social media at all, you most likely have seen the conversations regarding Outlaw Equine Hospital and its owner, Dr. Josh Harvey. The Texas Board of Veterinary Medicine temporarily suspended his license due to many reasons, with a few of them being inaccurate controlled substance logs, having non-veterinarians perform surgery, using compounded medications for patients that were not on the prescription, and shipping fraudulently obtained controlled substances to other veterinarians.

From this list, I think it is a good idea for veterinary practices to reflect on how their team is functioning. First, the biosecurity breaches listed above is a simple matter of training staff. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Taking the time to make sure your controlled drug logs are up to date is so important, and trusting the person in charge of that to do a really good job again comes back to training and practice standards.

The compounded medication scene with horses is crazy. Clients want compounded drugs because they are cheaper and many of the compounders do not allow “office use” for their products, so every patient needs its own prescription. That can be really difficult to manage, especially when the case load is intense.

Understanding state laws to know what non-veterinarians can and can’t do is so important. And lastly, with shipping controlled substances that were fraudulently obtained to other veterinarians, it is tough to understand the “why” behind it.

There are many areas of gray in everyone’s moral code, but there is less gray in the court of law. We have to constantly adhere to the laws and our moral code to make sure that we are always doing our best to do what is right.