Equine Ring Worm
As you’re grooming your horse prior to a trail ride, you notice a strange, round, hairless lesion right behind his forequarters where the girth tightens. It appears scaly and a little inflamed where he seems to have been biting at it. These are all signs of the common ringworm, and a new product on the market called Silverquine® can help you rid your horse of this contagious disease.
Causes
Dermatophytosis, commonly called ringworm, is caused not by worms, but by fungal spores that get under your horse’s skin and cause infection. Most common in horses 3 years of age and younger, and those whose immune systems are debilitated by disease, ringworm is spread from an infected horse to an uninfected one by the sharing of grooming tools, saddle pads and blankets, and harnesses. Living in dark, damp, crowded conditions (such as you see when horses are stall-bound during the winter) can also predispose an animal to ringworm.
Signs & Symptoms
Ringworm lesions first appear as hairless, scaly patches on the horse’s face, around the eyes, and on the legs, girth and saddle areas. They can be extremely itchy, and horses will bite and chew at the lesions to stop the irritation, often resulting in secondary bacterial skin infections. Ringworm is also highly contagious and can spread quickly from horse to horse, and horse to human.
Prevention
Preventing ringworm is a fairly simple, if not always easy, task. If your horse gets wet or dirty, use clean, disinfected grooming tools to remove as much mud and muck from his coat as possible. Make sure his stall and paddock area is as clean and dry as you can get it. Turn him out in a dry paddock on those clear, sunny days, and don’t blanket him unless it is absolutely necessary. If blanketing is inevitable, use a clean, dry garment that is his alone, and not shared with other horses.
Treatment
Begin treating ringworm in your horse by first clipping the hair away from the lesions, leaving them open to sunlight and air. Traditional veterinary treatment includes bathing your horse every day with a Miconazole-based shampoo for 5 days, and then once a week until the lesions are healed. Because Miconazole is a chemical, not a natural anti-fungal medication, side effects such as unusual or severe blistering, peeling, redness, itching, dryness or irritation of the skin have been known to occur.
Silverquine® is a new, ALL NATURAL, water-based topical gel that has been clinically proven to work on equine skin problems, including ringworm, rain rot, thrush and hoof thrush, summer sores, and equine wound care. And because it absorbs quickly into the skin, there is no moisture left behind to allow disease-causing fungus to grow.
Based on traditional veterinary medicine that used silver to help treat wounds and other infections in animals prior to the invention of modern-day antibiotics, Silverquine® is an ALL NATURAL product that contains no alcohol or synthetic chemicals to inhibit stem cell growth or epithelialization – the growth of granular tissue over open wounds.
In addition, our Silverquine® Technology consists of silver nano molecules (less than .015 micrometers in size) suspended within a water molecule. Our gel has been safety tested and proven more beneficial than silver sulfadiazine cream, a veterinary cream that contains 100 times the amount of silver found in Silverquine®. Silverquine® has even proven so non-toxic that it can be used to treat eye infections in horses without adverse effects.
Don’t wait until rainy weather or another infected animal causes problems for your horse. Be prepared for any skin, eye, or hoof issues all year round, and keep a tube in your equine first aid kit.