Hailey Anderson (left) and Shaelin Warner (right)

You can’t detect tapeworm eggs in fecal samples. Everyone knows that, right? Well, this is not entirely true.

Two UK Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment undergraduate students recently published a study demonstrating that one technique was capable of reliably detecting and enumerating equine tapeworm eggs in fecal samples from infected horses.

Recent data has suggested multidrug resistance in equine tapeworms, which has created a need for better and more systematic monitoring of these parasites. Hailey Anderson (Equine Science and Management) and Shaelin Warner (Agricultural and Medical Biotechnology) meticulously compared three different techniques over the course of several months.

One of the three techniques, referred to as the Proudman technique, found significantly more positive samples and recovered more eggs within the samples than the other two techniques. Overall, this technique diagnosed correctly in about 75% of the samples, whereas the other two performed at much lower levels.

It has become urgently important to screen for drug resistance in equine tapeworms, and current work in the Nielsen Laboratory aims at further refining this technique to make it suitable for use in the field.

The paper is fully published in the highly ranked journal Veterinary Parasitology with Anderson and Warner as joint first authors in recognition of their excellent hard work:

Hailey C. Anderson, Shaelin F. Warner, Nichol E. Ripley, Martin K. Nielsen, 2024. Performance of three techniques for diagnosing equine tapeworm infection, Veterinary Parasitology 327, 110152.

Full access to the paper here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ihJ515DeCeCYI

Martin Nielsen, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVM, Schlaikjer professor of Equine Infectious Disease, director of graduate students and associate professor in the University of Kentucky Department of Veterinary Science at the Gluck Equine Research Center