Workshop Objectives

Typhlocolitis is an acute and severe disease of adult horses associated with high mortality. It occurs worldwide. The extensive size of their colon and caecum makes adult equine colitis an often very acute and life-threatening illness. Although progress has been made in identifying causes, some 60% of cases still have no known cause. This makes diagnosis, treatment and prevention both challenging and frustrating.  

There is a need to increase collaboration and effort to improve understanding of acute colitis in adult horses, particularly focused on infectious causes.  New information regarding the microbial communities in the horse gut using next generation sequencing technology (NGS) could help unravel the causes of acute colitis in adult horses and improve how we control the disease.

Four key topic areas will be explored during the acute colitis workshop, including:

  • The Pathogens

  • The Pathophysiology

  • The Diagnostics

  • The Therapies

Goals and Purpose of the Havemeyer Workshop of Acute Colitis in Adult Horses

The goals of the Workshop are:

Part A: to increase collaboration and effort to improve understanding of acute colitis in adult horses, particularly focused on infectious causes;

Part B: to improve diagnostic pathologic and microbiologic standardization of the diagnosis of enterocolitis of horses.

Facilitated discussions throughout the workshop will stimulate discussions among participant to develop research priorities of this important and relatively poorly characterized severe illness of horses, to promote collaborative and multicenter studies to develop guidelines for best diagnostic standards and evidence-based treatment protocols, and to integrate and assess the clinical significance of intestinal microbiome studies that are currently occurring in equine research centers throughout the world.

The acute colitis workshop will be action-oriented. Each presentation is to include a brief overview of their topic and an assessment of the following:

  • What do we know? What we have done?

  • What don’t we know? What we are working on?

  • What do we need to know?

  • What new approaches are needed?

  • How do we collaborate to get the information we need?