DEADLY HORSE DISEASE RESEARCH TURNS TO SOIL SCIENCE
A huge effort is being made to discover the cause of a devastating horse disease called equine grass sickness (EGS), which damages ponies’ nervous systems and can cause paralysis of the intestine.
Soil specialists at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen and animal health experts at Moredun Research Institute are working together with the Equine Grass Sickness Fund to try to find clues about the origins of the disease. The scientists are comparing what’s in the soil taken from a hotspot of EGS in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with samples from horses with the disease.