Page 114 - Speedhorse March 2019

Change is never easy, even when
it’s for the better. Horsemen and officials in New Mexico have been
learning that the hard way over the past few months.
In June 2018, the New Mexico Racing Commission (NMRC) began a new drug test- ing contract with a new laboratory and, almost immediately, saw a rise in corticosteroid over- ages. In the 685 days before the switch, New Mexico had 52 corticosteroid overages. In the first 73 days of the new contract, it had 34.
The New Mexico Horsemen’s Association (NMHA) grew suspicious and called in experts to figure out what went wrong. At a public meeting in late November, drug testing experts Drs. Thomas Tobin and Rick Sams, together with racetrack veterinarians Drs. Clara Fenger, Clayton McCook, and Paul Jenson presented their analysis.
The spike, the group concluded, was not likely due to a change in veterinarians’ pro- tocols, and it wasn’t ineptitude on the part of the previous laboratory. The answer was more complex than that, and made it difficult for anyone to decide who was at fault for the rash of positive tests.
Prior to last summer, New Mexico had contracted with the Kenneth L Maddy Equine Analytical Chemistry Laboratory at the Univer- sity of California-Davis. In June, NMRC began a new contract with Industrial Laboratories
in Wheat Ridge, Colo. Both are accredited by the Racing Medication and Testing Consor- tium, and were both among the first to do so. Theoretically then, the capabilities of the labs were the same. What changed, Sams and Tobin
agreed, were the instructions in the contract NMRC signed.
NMRC’s prior contract with UC-Davis had limits on how many blood and urine samples could be tested. The budget for urine sample tests was large. The budget for blood samples was small, only allowing for 1,800 or so each year. Of those, blood samples were divided into two groups: those that would be tested for phenylbutazone and banamine only, and those that would be subjected to the full range of testing required by the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association’s American Graded Stakes Committee.
The problem with that, Sams said, is that New Mexico’s rules (and those of many other states) have some drug thresholds listed in urine, some in blood, and some in both. For
a commission to call a positive, its testing lab has to provide them with the concentration
of a drug in the appropriate medium. With such a small blood testing budget, Sams said UC-Davis would have been forced to hazard a guess at a horse’s drug levels based on its urine sample, which in the case of corticosteroids is a poor indicator of how much of the substance is actually in the horse.
“Are they missing some that were really over the [state] threshold? Absolutely,” said Sams
at a NMHA meeting held in late November. “They’re missing a lot of low ones. They may be missing high ones, because the urine sample is a poor substitute for the blood sample when the threshold is in the blood.
“That was dictated, not by the choices UC- Davis made, but by the memorandum they had agreed to. They had no other options.”
The new contract requires the lab to test paired blood and urine samples, meaning both the blood and the urine for each horse selected for testing.
Corticosteroids, not to be confused with anabolic steroids, are a type of anti-inflam- matory agent commonly used to reduce pain and swelling.
Corticosteroids are not the only therapeutic drugs whose thresholds are given in blood only. Cetirizine, cimetidine, dantrolene, diclofenac, DMSO, firocoxib, furosemide, glycopyrrolate, guaifenesin, isoflupredone, lidocaine, metho- carbamol, omeprazole, procaine penicillin, ranitidine, and xylazine all have their thresh- olds given in blood only. The previous contract didn’t allow for blood testing to be done for those drugs, either.
Interestingly, data provided at the NMHA meeting indicated the total number of blood samples taken in New Mexico from August 1, 2016, to May 31, 2017, was 4,556 – far above the number budgeted for testing. The number of samples actually tested in that time was 1,218. What happened to the rest of them? Sams says that remains unclear, but it’s likely many, if not most, were discarded, untested.
Sams and Tobin agreed – the spike probably didn’t happen because horsemen were using corticosteroids differently, but because the commission had finally allowed a lab to look for them.
“Any time you change labs you’re at risk of surprises,” said Tobin, toxicology expert from the University of Kentucky’s Gluck Equine Research Center. “That’s just the nature of the beast. One of the ways of handling this is to have a phase-in period ... the reason for these
Spike In Corticosteroid Tests Highlights Growing Pains
In New Mexico
by Natalie Voss
Horsemen and veterinarians feel like the playing field shifted under them without any warning.
110 SPEEDHORSE, March 2019