DISEASE KILLS 61 HORSES (PAGE 32, MARCH 15, 2010)

An outbreak of African Horse Sickness in parts of Accra, which threatens to wipe out the country’s horse population, has been detected by the Veterinary Services Division of the Ministry of Agriculture (MoFA).
The disease, which was detected in January, this year, had so far killed 61 horses.
To check the spread of the disease to other parts of the country, MoFA has declared Accra Polo Club, Burma Camp and the Race Turf Club as the infected areas to enable the Veterinary Services to carry out quarantine measures.
Additionally, the ministry is taking census of horses and donkeys in the country alongside a mass vaccination exercise to enable the Veterinary Services Division to take stock of the toll of the disease on horses and take measures to avoid reoccurrence of the terrible disease.
Dr Andy Alhassan, Research Officer in charge of Disease Diagnosis of the Veterinary Services Division of MoFA, told the Daily Graphic that sometime back in January, the Accra Polo Club reported to the Veterinary Services of the appearance of a strange disease that was killing their horses.
Dr Alhassan said a series of post-mortem were carried out on the dead horses and the samples sent to the World Reference Laboratory in the United Kingdom for analysis which confirmed the suspicion by veterinary doctors that the horses died of African Horse Sickness.
He said the report from the World Reference Laboratory confirmed that it was African Horse Sickness and the strain was Type 11.
He said as a result, MoFA had placed orders to procure polyvalent vaccines from South Africa to vaccinate all horses and donkeys against all the nine strains.
He, therefore, urged the general public not to move animals from the affected areas but to take preventive measure, such as the spraying of their surroundings, against the blood sucking insects known as cullicodes, suspected to be the causative agents of the disease.
He said even though the disease, which was deadly in horses, was not so deadly in donkeys, the danger was that the donkey could be a carrier that could transmit the disease to the horses with a devastating effect.
Dr Alhassan appealed to people importing animals into the country to first come for import permit to enable the Veterinary Services to monitor such imported animals for two weeks before releasing them.