🎂🎉 2019 marks a very special year for Westgate Labs as we celebrate our 20th anniversary of business helping to improve the way that horses are wormed in the UK. Laboratory founders, David and Gillian Booth, placed their first advert in Horse & Hound, 11th February 1999, and when forward thinking horse owners responded the concept of postal worm counts was born!
There's a common misconception that worm egg counts shouldn’t be used over winter as ‘worms aren’t active’ and ‘small redworm are all encysted’ in the gut wall - therefore not egg laying to be counted in a test. Our response? Well, not quite… There are still a number of instances when a worm egg count can provide very useful information between the months of December and February.
Are you friendly, well organised and good on the phone? We’re seeking someone to join our super team to support us on the frontline of delivering animal health services from our busy postal laboratory in rural Northumberland. If you would like to join our team then we would love to hear from you. Applications close on Friday 18th January 2019.
🎄💩✉ Our lab and office will be operating a reduced hours service over the Christmas Holidays from Monday 24th December. If you are sending in samples then the lab will operate each day there is a post to ensure all testing is completed and results are returned. Any shop orders received will also be processed and sent out but the main office will remain closed for general enquiries. We'll be back to our normal hours from 2nd January.
We are again offering our popular winter resistance test, available at a reduced price of £5.50 December - February inclusive, aiming to target the treatment of small redworm. The winter 2018/19 offer encourages horse owners to conduct a worm egg count, treat for the potentially fatal encysted stages of small redworm and to test any positive horses again to ensure that the treatment has been effective.
❄🐴 Winter parasite control ❄️ December - February ✅ treat for the possibility of encysted redworm ✅ test to ensure treatment has been effective Responsible horse owners aim to minimise the wormers they give their horses, basing their parasite control on the evidence of worms being present rather than treating routinely. There is however one dangerous parasitic stage of the small redworm that we can’t test for (yet!) that can have fatal consequences. Instead we need to treat proactively for this.
A targeted worming programme usually relies on worm egg counts through spring, summer and autumn with a proactive treatment for the possibility of encysted redworm in the winter. November to early December is that awkward time of year when deciding ‘is it winter enough or not yet?’ can make us question our own sanity. So how and why do we make this call? Let’s look at it objectively to help make an informed decision.
Autumn is traditionally known as ‘tapeworm time’ as this was a good point in the year to worm hunting horses coming in from a summer at grass. It can be a useful way to remember to target tapeworm but there’s no reason to stick to this routine if another serves you better – and certainly no point in giving a wormer for the sake of it without knowing if there are parasites present to treat and if so, which ones?
[Now resolved] It was a very lean bag of post that we collected from the post office this morning 21st September, along with the news that our local sorting office at Team Valley, that serves the north east of England, suffered a walk out of staff overnight. We’re reliably informed that the morning shift hasn’t come in either.