Читать книгу Fractures in the Horse - Группа авторов - Страница 71

Studies of races held at New York racecourses between 1983 and 1985 reported 2.1 fractures per 1000 starts on dirt tracks and 1.1 per 1000 starts on turf tracks [15]. In Kentucky, between 1992 and 1993, 1.4 catastrophic injuries per 1000 starts were reported [16]. The majority of these injuries affected bones in the forelimb. In 1990, the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) requested that the California Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory System carry out post‐mortem examination of all horses that die at racetracks under the jurisdiction of the CHRB. Subsequently, the risk of fatal fracture on these tracks during the 1990s was reported as 1.5 per 1000 starts [17, 18].

More recently, the Jockey Club in the North America initiated the routine collection of (fatal) injury data from North American racetracks, known as the Equine Injury Database (EID). Currently, racetracks that stage 96% of all race starts in North America contribute to the database. Between January 2009 and December 2014, there were 2.0 fatal and non‐fatal fractures per 1000 starts on reporting racetracks [19]. Annual statistics relating to the risk of fatal injury are supplied by the Jockey Club, which in the last four years have shown a significant reduction in the risk of fatal injury from 1.89 per 1000 starts (2014) to 1.61 per 1000 starts (2017) [20]. The majority of these injuries involve a distal limb fracture, so it is fair to assume that the figure of 2.0 fractures per 1000 starts reported between 2009 and 2014 [19] will have dropped by a few decimal points since that time. All in all, there has been a 20% drop in the incidence of equine fatal injury during racing in North America between 2009 and 2017. On the assumption that the number of starts had remained constant, this is equivalent to approximately 150 fewer horses dying on North American racetracks in 2017 compared with 2009.