| Archive for It's About The Horse The Free Forum for those Doing Parelli - and a whole lot More! "Anything forced and misunderstood can never be beautiful." Xenophon (430-355 B.C.), |
| karmikacres |
Fecal Egg CountsAnyone know how to do their own fecals? If so, how did you learn? I would like to learn how to do them.Thanks! Karen |
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| ladycfp |
I ordered a kit from farmsteadhealth.com and it had very good instructions included. I already owned a microscope (National Geographic home version) we used in homeschooling and I intended to make it a science project. Alas... we never seemed to get around to it. I talked to my vet at length and she said home counts were notoriously unreliable, as were lab counts. According to her, only measuring what comes out in the stool can be deceiving- in either direction.
Your mileage may vary. At least you know where to get the supplies! Let us know how it goes. |
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| gideon |
fecalsLadycfp, I'm interested to know what your vet recommends if fecals are unreliable both at home and from labs. Surely she doesn't say you just deworm X times a year using Y dewormer?I'm doing a study on my own horse by doing fecal egg counts (quantitative, as opposed to a qualitative fecal egg sample that just notes what is there). The current thinking is that only about ten percent of horses are responsible for most of the worm eggs that are shed, because mature horses become somewhat resistant to parasites. So if you do fecal egg counts and they are low or absent, you can skip deworming them at that time. The benefit is two-fold: it costs you less to deworm in one year, and you are not exposing the local worms to medication that they might develop resistance to. I could do fecal egg counts, or even just fecals, at home but I haven't got round to it. I take fresh samples into the local vet, and they send it off to a lab (seems hardly any vets do in-house fecals anymore). So far my 13 year old mare has been negative three times in a row. I will deworm her this month for bots, though, and I will deworm in spring for tapes anyway because you can't pick up tape eggs in a fecal. |
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| karmikacres |
Negative does not mean zero, just below whatever target value they set. Unless they specifically give you a numerical egg count, you may still have eggs.
Mike |
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| PasoBaby_CarolU |
Don't forget that there are also worms that don't show up on egg counts, and even the species that do, they go through encrusted states where you won't see eggs. My vet recommends at least one, yearly, broad spectrum worming that gets bots and tape worms also. | ||
| gideon |
Correct, Mike, because no diagnostic test is foolproof, and because as Carol says, ingested eggs hatch in the horse's gut and go through larval stages before they start producing eggs and they can't be detected at that time. The lab report on a fecal egg count gives you an answer in a set range, and my mare always shows up in the lowest range. In that range, deworming is considered to be unnecessary. I am in fact a bit suspicious about the fact I've had three negatives in a row, and I think there is a possibility that the fecal sample I submit may not be refrigerated for the several hours before it is tested. In that case, the eggs can hatch and the larvae are not detected. This is why I would like to try my own home testing. I do think it makes sense to test at least once a year to see how your regime is working, and to minimize the number of times every year that you give your horse dewormer. We only have three broad classes of dewormers available to us, and worms in some localities are already resistant to one or more of them. If we get broad resistance to one or two of those drugs, we have nothing else to use. It is expensive to do fecal egg counts every three months for a year or more, but once I do that, I'll know whether my mare is among the 90% that are resistant to worms or the ten percent that are susceptible. Then I can plan my deworming more strategically. But this is not financially feasible for people with a lot of horses. |
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| creekwood |
I'm interested in how you do the test ladycpf. In the clinic we centrifuge it for 8 minutes with something that has a higher specific gravity than water (we usually use zinc sulfate) which I believe has a S.G. of 1.18. then add enough zinc sulfate for a positive meniscus, put a slide cover on it, and then the eggs will float to the top and stick to the cover. Of course, this is for qualitative fecal testing. |
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| 3perfectponies |
Fecal Egg CountsHey guys, here is a do-it-yourself fecal egg count kit - bunch of good info on the site too.www.eggzamin.com |
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| CanChaser12 |
I bought the Eggzamin kit a few weeks ago and has been great. The website is really informative and there is tons of assistance to help you learn how to do FECs (including a veterinary parasitologist). If you want to start doing your own, I suggest looking into Eggzamin |