Pigeon Fever Ordeal

This is an email I received today from a long time canine health customer of mine.  I didn't even know she had horses!

Hello Kay,
We had Rainbow come down with pigeon fever after a new boarder went on a trail ride across town where all the horses on that ride came down with it. She tried to hide it but when her horse got so sick that she needed a vet and other horses were showing symptoms, the truth came out. We had the vet out and put Rainbow on antibiotics and isolated him. He seemed to have recovered or so we thought. Rainbow started to go downhill and had lost a lot of weight. I called out the vet and told him to take blood becasue I needed to know what was happening to Rainbow. Rainbow's drawn blood came out brown! He was urinating whole blood! He was within a couple of hours of needing a transfusion! We spent thousands of dollars and a whole lot of praying to keep him alive! It took over a year for Rainbow to recover! He was so emaciated! He was twenty-one at the time and had been a hard keeper all his life. We adopted him when he was nine years old. He was on holistic herbs, specail supplements, red-cell, and Mezotrace. We gave him his hay, Omolene 2000, Senior food, hay and grain pellets,psylium and carrots. We had his teeth floated twice a year and he had to wormed every thee weeks.

He was on antibiotics for six months. The vets are finding out that one or two doses of antibiotics are not enough and many horses will relapse. Herbs and supplements are not enough to get rid of it. there are three different ways pigeon fever can affect a horse, internally, externally and systemically. Just because the swelling goes away ont he outside doesn't mean the infection is gone. That is the mistake many of us made with our horses at our ranch. the rains brought from the top pastures into all of the pens, down into the cow pasture. There was no way to get away from it! You can carry it on your shoes, the wheel barrel, etc. Bleach and gloves became our best friends. We cleaned out own pens and watched our other horses to see if any of them were also going to come down with it. Anyone that says it isn't a life-threatening disease hasn't been around enough cases! It is extremely contagious and has a very long incubation period, 60 to 77 days. Just when we thought the ranch was clean, another case would pop up and we had to start counting the days again until the next outbreak! Yes, it was a nightmare.....

I would appreciate any information you would have on pigeon fever, psuedotuberculosis.

Brinda Lee Chavez