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By MICHAEL MARTZ
AnutM Nmpapa* Staff Writar
GREAT FALLS — Insect control and strict attention to the early symptoms are the best methods to control Potomac Fever this summer, veterinary scientists from four states told horse owners last week.
The scientists admitted they lack many answers to questions about the mysterious, often fatal, equine disease.
Approximately 660 people came to Madeira School in Greenway Friday night for a seminar sponsored by the Morris Animal Foundation, a Colorado non-profit group that is channeling donations for research to unravel the mystery of Acute Equine Diarrhea Syndrome, or Potomac Fever.
The disease, which is seasonal and apparently peculiar to the Potomac River region, has afflicted more than 300 horses and killed approximately 90 of them the past five years, since it first appeared in Montgomery County, Md.
It has since spread into Virginia, which reported 32 cases and 10 deaths last year, and Pennsylvania, which reported 25 cases and four deaths. Reports of the disease, or something very much like it, also have come from states around the country.
The seminar, and a special session for veterinarians that afternoon, drew Potomac Fever researchers, including scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine who received approximately $31,000 in Morris grant money last year.
What that research has produced are suspicions, but not evidence, that Potomac Fever is a virus borne by biting insects, not contagious, but likely to return to areas it has afflicted before.
Three of the scientists — Drs. Jonathan E. Palmer and Robert H. Whitlock of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center and Dr: Allen L. Jenny of the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa — collaborated in reproducing AEDS in a healthy horse by transfusing blood from a sick one.
But they don’t know what the agent is and how it spreads.
“We have not positively identified it,” Dr. Palmer states in a background paper. “We also don’t know whether all cases of the disease syndrome are caused by this agent....We are not
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