While your veterinarian is stitching wounds, delivering foals, and monitoring colics, researchers from around the world are publishing research that often advances the collective of horse health care. So to bring busy practitioners up to speed on the top studies in a variety of fields, a panel of veterinarians presents a news-type program each year at the annual American Association of Equine Practitioners’ Convention.

Pat McCue, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACT, a professor of equine theriogenology at Colorado State University’s Equine Reproduction Laboratory, described the reproduction studies he deemed most important and useful to a veterinary audience during the Kester News Hour. This year’s lecture took place Dec. 7 at the convention, held in Nashville, Tenn.

First McCue described a retrospective study in which researchers evaluated the bacteria isolated from mares’ reproductive tracts, along with the efficacy of the drugs used to treat them. McCue said the researchers identified potentially pathogenic organisms (such as Escherichia coli and β-hemolytic Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus) in 31% of the 8,296 samples evaluated; additionally, 12.6% of the samples contained multiple organisms.

But the key point McCue drove home was that the researchers found that several pathogens had increased antimicrobial resistance to a variety of drugs. This, he said, reinforces the importance of using susceptibility testing (or evaluating how susceptible an isolate is to specific medications) before implementing treatment