In a meeting in May of 2010 at the Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture in Iceland, a decision was made to cancel the National Horse Festival because of an infectious respiratory disease which has been affecting Icelandic horses. The festival was set to take place between 27 June and 4 July in Skagafjordur. The festival is held every other year with thousands of people attending from both Iceland and abroad.
An Icelandic horse in motion
The respiratory illness that caused nasal discharge and coughing in nearly 40,000 Icelandic horses in 2010 has now been linked to a strain of Strepotococcus zooepidemicus.
© 2013 by Dagur Brynjolfsson
Now, that respiratory illness that caused nasal discharge and coughing in nearly 40,000 Icelandic horses in 2010 has been linked to a strain of Strepotococcus zooepidemicus.
The first cases of the disease were diagnosed in early April 2010. The infection has had a particularly bad effect on horses that have been kept inside with the morbidity rate being very high in those horses, indicating that the horse population has none or very little immunity to the infectious agent.
Although finding the cause of the illness has taken 2 years, it is good to finally know the cause of the problem in these horses.
The organism, which is closely related to the microbe that causes strangles infections, is commonly found on the skin and in the respiratory tract of horses and occasionally causes significant disease.
Researchers originally looked for a viral cause of the epidemic, but no virus was found in affected horses. However, most of the tested equines were carrying S. zooepidemicus, leading investigators to pinpoint the bacterial strain as the cause.