Fran Jurga`s Hoofcare + Lameness: University of Pennsylvania

Showing posts with label University of Pennsylvania. Show all posts

Thursday, June 22, 2017

The Royal Veterinary College’s Equine Locomotor Research Course for farriers expands to the USA

Royal Veterinary College farrier research diploma program in USA

Good news! The already-successful graduate diploma research course for farriers at England's Royal Veterinary College (RVC) will be offered in the United States, beginning in January 2018. The deadline for applications is September 4, 2017.

Click this link to read the rest of this article

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Penn Vet Names Hankenson to Fill the Dean W. Richardson Professorship in Equine Disease Research Position; Laminitis To Be a Priority

Received via press release:

The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) is pleased to announce that following an international search for a uniquely qualified candidate, Kurt D. Hankenson, DVM, MS, PhD has been appointed as the first incumbent of the Dean W. Richardson Professorship in Equine Disease Research.

The Dean W. Richardson Professorship was established by Mr. and Mrs. M. Roy Jackson, following the hospitalization of their Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro, at Penn Vet’s New Bolton Center. Their desire to contribute to the treatment and elimination of laminitis was the catalyst for their gift to endow the professorship.

Mr. and Mrs. Jackson commented, “We are very pleased that this position has been filled and are confident that under Dr. Hankenson’s leadership significant steps forward will be made in the study of laminitis and other equine musculoskeletal diseases. We have faith in Penn Veterinary Medicine’s ability to do the kind of in-depth work that will bring about positive results.”

Dr. Hankenson did his undergraduate work at the University of Illinois, where he earned his BS in 1990, and then he earned his veterinary degree at University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine in 1992. Following his time as an equine clinician, he returned to academia and completed a Master of Science degree at Purdue University’s School of Veterinary Medicine in 1997. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine in 2001.

Dr. Hankenson’s career has included an impressive range of clinical and academic positions at both human and veterinary healthcare institutions, and currently holds a faculty position at Penn Vet and at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

“I’d like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Jackson for supporting the research mission of Penn Vet by providing this Professorship. I am thrilled to be entering a new phase of my research and teaching career at New Bolton Center, and to be expanding my research program to focus on equine musculoskeletal diseases, particularly laminitis,” said Dr. Hankenson.

He continued: “I will capitalize on my background as an equine practitioner and basic scientist, and will utilize established relationships with scientists and veterinarians in the Philadelphia region and around the world to develop new diagnostics and treatments to prevent disease, and to expedite regeneration and return to normal function. The Richardson Chair is a unique and unparalleled opportunity for New Bolton Center, Penn Vet, and the equine industry. It will permit me to develop and sustain a research program focused on equine health.”

Surgeon Dr. Dean W. Richardson and his team cared for Barbaro for nine months, from May 2006 until January 2007. Dr. Richardson noted, “We are very excited to attract a scientist of this caliber to this position. In today's research environment, it will be an enormous advantage to have someone like Dr. Hankenson, who has a proven record of both research funding and productivity. He has a wide range of connections both here at Penn and throughout the scientific community. Dr. Hankenson's roots are in the horse world and he is sure to make major contributions to equine research.”

Joan C. Hendricks, VMD, PhD, the Gilbert S. Kahn Dean of Veterinary Medicine, said that she is especially pleased at Dr. Hankenson’s appointment.

“This is another example of Penn Vet’s ability to attract and retain the very best and brightest in the field of veterinary medicine,” said Dean Hendricks. “I am thrilled that Dr. Hankenson will be leading this endeavor and am confident that under his leadership, Penn Vet will remain at the forefront of discovery for this debilitating disease.”

The goal of the Dean W. Richardson Professorship is the development of a world-leading research program directly applicable to equine diseases, with particular emphasis on improving the understanding, prevention, and treatment of equine laminitis. A debilitating, painful, and uncompromising condition, laminitis is the second leading killer of horses worldwide and is presently uncurable.

Winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby and a beloved American icon, Barbaro suffered a catastrophic fracture during the running of the Preakness that year. After undergoing successful surgery at New Bolton Center, he developed severe laminitis, which eventually led to his death. This Professorship serves as a lasting legacy of Barbaro.

(end of press release)

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Paynter Watch: Surgery at University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center Next Option for Ill Zayat Colt, Laminitis Under Control

Paulick Report flashed the news today that champion three-year-old Thoroughbred colt Paynter will be transferred tomorrow from Upstate Equine Medical Center in Schuylerville, New York to the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, outside Philadelphia.

Owner Ahmed Zayat of Zayat Racing has been announcing his horse's medical condition on Twitter since the colt was admitted to the clinic near Saratoga over Labor Day Weekend. Zayat's tweets informed his fans that the colt was suffering from severe colitis and, later, laminitis.

Today Zayat turned over the responsibility of announcing his colt's next move to The Paulick Report, who released the story to the public.

Dr. Southwood (Penn Vet
web site photo)

Paynter's medical condition may require some form of surgery; colon surgery for colitis treatment is a specialty of Louise Southwood Parente, DVM, MS, PhD at New Bolton Center, according to The Paulick Report.

Background

As is so often the case, acute laminitis in three of the horse's four feet was diagnosed after a particularly severe extended period of fever and diarrhea. Dr. Bryan Fraley, a laminitis specialist farrier-veterinarian from Lexington, Kentucky applied foot casts and, from Zayat's reports, helped the colt avoid entering the chronic phase of the disease, during which coffin bone rotation or sinking would have compromised his athletic future.

The foot casts have been removed, according to Zayat's tweets, and the horse is wearing Soft-Ride boots for support and comfort.

Many horses do not survive colitis or the laminitis that follows. Paynter's story has been a great inspiration to people who follow racing and are concerned with horse health. The colt has been in the care of Laura H. Javsicas, VMD, DACVIM, of the Upstate Equine Medical Center.

To read much more about Paynter's medical condition, The Hoof Blog directs you to the Paulick Report's Paynter to New Bolton Center Special Report, published late this afternoon.

Thumbs up photo for title graphic provided by Kristian Niemi.

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Monday, September 17, 2012

Hoofcare History: Unravelling the Tangled Past, One Horseshoe at a Time

You'll need a half hour to watch this video. Then you might need the rest of your life to read, research and do your part in documenting the unwritten history of horseshoeing. Thanks to the University of Pennsylvania for videotaping this talk of Pat Reilly, farrier at the University's New Bolton Center.

Horseshoeing history is full of gaps, as Pat Reilly mentions again and again in this talk. It resembles nothing less than a wheel of Swiss cheese. It is full of holes. In fact, it contains more holes than cheese.

Remember that the next time you buy some cheese. Or buy into anyone else's interpretation of the history of horseshoeing.

The Coast Guard employed plenty of
farriers during World War II when US
beaches were patrolled on horseback;
they were looking for German
U-boats. (© US Coast Guard image)

Part of the problem, of course, is that once you start reading it, you realize that it was written by outsiders looking in. Veterinarians who had a theory to prove, or a position to defend. Intellectuals who considered themselves horsemen, and wrote opinionated tomes on hoof theory that, when read today, invariably get lumped together with legitimate volumes of valuable hoof knowledge.

How many people stop to actually read the old books? Most are satisfied with the drawings and plates, and never read the text. Much of the "wisdom" we quote today was not written by farriers at all, but by commercial promoters or agricultural societies bent on improving horse husbandry by advancing farriery...sometimes without ever consulting a farrier.

Pat Reilly lumps together the history of farriers and the history of horseshoeing and while it seems that the two are flip sides of the same coin, they are both huge and separate subjects. The history of farriers is a metaphor for the history of human labor, and can demonstrate all the industrial phases of mechanization of labor, the social and political side of Labor, and the role and status of the specialized laborer within the military of various nations.

Possibly the first non-military
farrier schools in America
were the "Indian
Schools" like this one in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These
Sioux boys were shipped east to
learn to be horseshoers.

The history of horseshoeing, on the other hand, is one and the same as the history of horses and their domestication, and the farrier's status in the horse world mirrors the waxing and waning and ultimate re-invention of the horse's role in western life.

People have poked at building a better horseshoe with the same interest as the cliche of building a better mousetrap: if it could just be done, life would be easier, and the animal would benefit from a kinder device.

But here we are, more than 2000 years from those ancient first horseshoes dug up in Europe, and we're still at it, trying to get to the root of hoof problems in horses.

No archeologist has ever jumped for joy at discovering an ancient mousetrap. But the evolution of the horseshoe is a way of documenting progress across centuries.

We can't see where we're going if we can't see where we have been.

I know a lot of people are interested in farrier history, but yet there are not enough of them. Of you. Of me. If you have read this far, you must be interested.

It's not enough to be interested, you have to have a plan.

Old farrier books are great, but you
need to research the credentials of
the authors. Figuring out why a book
was written can be an education
in itself.

I would caution people not to be like me and charge headlong into trying to learn everything about everything. The holes in the cheese will swallow you up. The files and boxes and notes will pile up in your life and mock you when you look across the room. "You'll never get to the bottom of this," is their taunt. "No one ever has."

So you want to learn about farrier history? Have at it. Pick a hole in the past--any hole, on any continent, in any period of history, in any language--and start researching. Stay in that hole until you fill it in, then move on to another one. But when you fill it in, stop and share it with the rest of us.

Why doesn't anyone know
or care who Jack Mac
Allan was? Where did
his shoes go? Michigan
State doesn't even know
it ever had a farrier
school,or that its Scottish-
import farrier was the
first US shoeing champion.

There are plenty of holes to go around.

Farriery has no headquarters. It has no library building with ivy-covered walls. The answers we need are not in books, however. The farrier books are just soldiers at the gate.

The answers are buried in the books of military, social and labor history. They're in the patent office records. They are in the town and state historical museums where old blacksmith shops and horse nail and shoe manufacturers' records are watched over by amateur historians who don't even understand what was manufactured in their own towns.

The answers are buried in footnotes and appendices and boxes of clutter marked "unreferenced manuscripts"--boxes that no one has ever asked to open.

I've always wanted to start a Horseshoeing History Society, but feared it would disband before it even started, out of the sheer weight of the mission, or be dismissed by academic historians who purport that there is no way to validate the lost "history" that farriery lacks, just as we are finding it so difficult to come to grips with the oxymoron of "evidence-based farriery".

Why did the World's Fair in
St. Louis have this building
with a horseshoe theme?

But if each of us identified a specific hole and spent time trying to research it and fill it in, we might move forward. It sounds like Pat Reilly has; the fact that he singlehandedly resurrected the Podological Museum for the University of Pennsylvania is reason to celebrate.

If academic historians knew about the gaping cheese holes, they might send graduate students our way. And perhaps, one day, farriery might be freed from the curse of cyclically repeating--or prolonging--its past.

If you're with me, claim your hole in the cheese wheel and climb in. Surround yourself. Nourish yourself by studying the solid cheese that does exist. Then jump off the cliff. Pick a date on the calendar and pledge to report back on what you find. You might come back defeated, you might come back haunted by ghosts, you might come back cynical and confused.

Then again, it just might change your life.

No one--and no profession--moves forward without coming to grips with the past. Remember this, too: It's entirely possible that farriery needs to turn its back on the past, to hold a funeral and declare itself once and for all defunct, so that the real future can begin. If that is so, the past might tell us where to go from here.

Click to order now for immediate shipping; it will look great on your wall!

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Sunday, September 04, 2011

New Bolton Center: "The Rest of the Story" with Radio Legend Paul Harvey

The University of Pennsylvania built a world-class equine hospital and research center outside Philadelphia in the 1950s. "New Bolton Center" is now a household word to Hoofcare and Lameness readers, but it was big news when the clinic opened almost 70 years ago. It was such big news that legendary radio commentator Paul Harvey had to tell America "the rest of the story". The equine surgery unit is known worldwide for its innovative anesthesia-recovery pool.

Update: I am sorry that the original recording of the 1950s Paul Harvey radio program describing the futuristic wonders of the Penn Vet New Bolton Center equine hospital is no longer available.

It seems like a long time ago, but as soon as I hear the voice, I'm taken back in time. At our house, there was a radio on the kitchen counter. It came on when a blizzard or a hailstorm was predicted. It came on when Something Big happened in the news. It told me that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, that Nixon had resigned, that Secretariat had been syndicated and retired to stud.

That radio played right through mealtimes and while our bodies were fueled, our brains were alternately bombarded and enriches with the news of the world and, on summer afternoons, the Red Sox games. It came on at breakfast, lunch and dinner: the news seemed especially important at lunch.

Lunchtime was especially important. My father came home from his office to check the farm every day at noon, and lunch was on the table at exactly 12. We might talk right through the news but a few minutes after noon, the room went silent and we all listened for about four minutes. A man's voice filled the kitchen and he told us a story.

Radio storyteller Paul Harvey

It wasn't the stories he told, but how he told them. Many of the stories were about everyday things. He had a sing-songy voice, though, and the story was always a puzzle. He'd talk in a staccato rhythm that almost hypnotized you.

On and on he rambled and then, bam! He'd hit you with an ending you weren't expecting. And every day's story ended the same way: "And....now...you...know the REST of the story..."

We'd look at each other. Usually, none of us had any inkling what the rest of the story was until Paul Harvey let the storyteller's cat out of his bag.

I don't think I was listening the day he described the medical wonders of the University of Pennsylvania's new futuristic medical center--with the punch line that it was horses, not people--but I know my family would have cheered.

How did he come up with those stories, day in and day out? I don't know, but if he was writing now, he'd surely be a blogger.

I didn't grow up with the tradition of radio as my primary source of news and entertainment; I was a product of television (Thanks, Bullwinkle! Thanks, Mr. Ed!), to be sure, but I think there must have been such magic to gather around the radio in the days before television and be carried away by the talented people who finessed that medium.

There's a little of it left today, and you can hear it on Christmas when NPR broadcasts the radio play of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, or on some of the great NPR, APR and BBC radio shows like This American Life.

I experienced what I call one of my "Paul Harvey moments" when I listened to a radio documentary tribute to John Lennon on the anniversary of his death last December. I was driving through New Jersey on my way home from the AAEP Convention, serenaded by song after song by John Lennon. It took a while before I realized that what I was listening to was actually a documentary. As I continued to listen, the documentary ended and the broadcast went live.

I started to listen a little more closely.

Then it happened. At precisely the moment when John Lennon had been shot outside his Manhattan apartment 30 years earlier, I realized I was leaving New Jersey and climbing up the ramp onto the George Washington Bridge. I'd be driving over the Hudson River, with the lights of all of New York and New Jersey twinkling as far as the eye could see.

New York's George Washington Bridge

I knew that people would be gathering in Central Park's Strawberry Fields far below me. I didn't know, though, that Yoko Ono would light two candles on the windowsill of the dark apartment where she and Lennon had lived, as a signal to the fans standing vigil in the park. But I do believe that at just that moment, when the radio played Give Peace a Chance and I was crossing the middle of the span, all the lights of Manhattan below me blinked off and then came back on.

I had to keep driving. You don't take your eyes off the road for more than a second on the George Washington Bridge. You can't stop and ask the guy in the toll booth, "Did that really happen?"

A minute later I was in the Bronx, rocketing toward Connecticut and home.

I don't know what will happen one week from today, on September 11, to mark the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Towers attack and disaster. But I wish I had the bird's eye view from the top of that bridge, and I wish Paul Harvey was still alive to talk to me from that little radio, so he could tell me the rest of the story.

I think I'll turn off the television that day, and turn on the radio, so I can really hear what someone has to say. Radio has a power all its own, as I've known all my life but just realized now.

TO LEARN MORE

Paul Harvey's obituary in TIME Magazine
University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center web site

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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Laminitis Makes Strange Bedfellows at New Bolton: Pacing Stallion Artsplace and Barbaro Fight Founder Side by Side

According to the web site harnessracing.com, and as quoted on the US Trotting Association web site, leading pacing (harness racing) sire Artsplace has been moved from Southwind Farm in New Jersey where he has been standing at stud. The 18-year-old sire of no less than 14 $1 million winners has been suffering from laminitis for some time, and will now be treated at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center outside Philadelphia. This is the same hospital where Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro is recovering from a fractured hind leg and contralimb laminitis.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Barbaro Funds Will Help Laminitis Research

This is second-hand news, so please wait for an official announcement before believing it, but...

In an interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer this weekend, owner Gretchen Jackson reported that she expects half of the donations to the Barbaro Fund at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center will go to laminitis research.

"Isn't that nice?" you may be musing..."Bring me some real news!" But wait...generous people have already donated more than $1.25 million to the fund, which means that roughly $600,000 will go to research.

But whose research? Chances are, the funds will stay right at New Bolton Center, where a laminitis research initiative has been on the wish list anyway.

Here's a quote lifted from the article: One of her (Gretchen Jackson, owner of Babaro) top priorities, she said, is New Bolton's Barbaro Fund, which has received 1,500 contributions totaling $1,225,000. Jackson said half the fund is slated to go for laminitis research, in the grandest-scale attempt yet to eradicate the disease. She's had a conversation with Secretariat's owner, Penny Chenery, about the disease, because Secretariat died from it.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/special_packages/latest/15592399.htm

In the photo: jockey Edgar Prado visiting with Barbaro and surgeon Dean Richardson on September 19. Photo by Sabina Louise Pierce/University of Pennsylvania.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

All's Quiet on the Barbaro Front: Latest News from University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center

Barbaro is improving slowly and steadily according to veterinarians at Penn’s George D. Widener Hospital . “We are pleased with his progress,” said Dr. Dean Richardson, Chief of Surgery. “He is wearing the cast on his right hind limb well; we continue to monitor it closely, and we expect to change the cast and radiograph the leg within the next seven to 10 days.”

In addition, Barbaro, winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby, continues to stand comfortably on his laminitic left hind foot. “The left hind foot is progressing well, especially as it grows down from the coronary band,” said Dr. Richardson. “However, we remain cautious, because Barbaro will still need several more months of healing before we’ll know how well the overall hoof structure can be restored.”

--end of official report from New Bolton Center

In an interview in The Thoroughbred Times, Barbaro's trainer Michael Matz said that he was still concerned with the possibility of laminitis in the front feet.

Read a FAQ page on laminitis with Dr. James Orsini of New Bolton Center: www.vet.upenn.edu/newsandevents/news/Laminitis.htm