Hi, I'm Danvers.
I'm the Hoof Health Consultant for SmartPak,
and we're going to talk about White Line Disease today.
White Line Disease is occasionally
referred to as onychomycosis.
That is an infection of the fingernail or the toenail.
Basically, it's a fungal infection,
and it differs from thrush in that manner.
Thrush is a bacterial infection.
White Line Disease is a fungal infection, therefore,
it's more pervasive, more difficult
to fight and get rid of.
White Line Disease causes more of a problem,
and it comes in in the white line or the lamina,
and it simply eats away at this area.
It's a very cheesy-looking white, almost like, powdery
look.
And as you start working at this, it'll disintegrate
and you'll find cavities and holes that
come up through the lamina.
You can take a probe and run up into that structure,
and you'll find very often it'll go that high up into the wall,
or even higher.
And it may be isolated to an area of fractions of an inch
or it may pervade the entire hoof capsule
and go from one side to the other.
In and of itself, White Line Disease doesn't cause pain.
It's not a problem in that respect.
What it does is it detaches the sensitive structure
from the insensitive structure, and you
lose the integrity of the hoof wall and the hoof capsule.
The end result, untreated, can be a laminitic episode,
where your horse will rotate simply
because he's lost connectivity.
What you really need to do is to get your vet and your farrier
involved and make certain that this is the condition you're
dealing with.
The main reason for that is that you
want to make sure that you're not dealing with simple balance
issues and maintenance issues.
To really treat it, what you have to do
is open that area up and oxygenate it.
The minute you do that, you're taking a base of support
away from the horse.
As a general rule of thumb, if you remove more than 30%
of this base of support in that procedure,
then you're going to have to support that hoof capsule
with some sort of appliance.
It may be a bar shoe, a heart bar shoe, any number of ways
that you would provide support back to this capsule.
If you do end up resecting the hoof walls
or dealing with compromised hoof wall, what you want to do
is to get good growth.
A hoof doesn't repair itself, it replaces itself.
So anything you can do to encourage growth
is going to be wonderful.
That means exercise and activity as much
as you are allowed to do given the conditions.
And it includes a good hoof supplement program,
so anything you can do is going to be useful.
Once you have a true diagnosis and you've
established a treatment protocol with your vet and farrier,
then you want to make sure that you follow the veterinarian's
instructions on how to provide care for that.
Most often they're going to have you apply some sort of topical.
In many cases it'll be a tamed iodine,
a Betadine-type product.
But there are a number of commercial products,
and again as always make certain that you're
using something that is prescribed by your veterinarian
or a commercially based product for this purpose.
I hope this was helpful.
Stay with us for more hoof health tips from SmartPak.