27/04/2012

(27th April 2012)

For the past few years, Italian Horse Protection has been trying to demonstrate the current regulation about EIA is just a house of cards, built over a wave of unjustified panic, and without real scientific foundations.

Thanks to the data provided by laboratories and Italian infectious diseases’ experts, and thanks to the observation of the herd of EIA-positive hosted in our rescue centre, we know this disease has such a low incidence (both in mortality and possible transmission to other equines) to result irrelevant.

We have repeatedly asked for a revision of the regulation bases of these facts; we have repeatedly offered to the Health Ministry to use our hers of horses as a national observatory, to finally study the disease and adequate the regulation to its effective need for control. We have sided with Rocket’s owners in the battle for her release from an illegitimate measure.

All we got from the Ministry were silences and words of circumstance.

Thus, how could we not be bewildered by the news the Italian EIA Reference Centre applied on large scale an non-official test to “discover” positive horses, the same one used on Rocket? We are talking about the infamous immunoblotting, test that cannot be used for diagnostic use, so much no Italian laboratory is certified for its use. We have always wondered how many horses have been killed because of illegitimate measures as Rocket’s, based on the immunoblotting (also because some owners of horses declared positives reported us the pressures received by Local health authorities to destroy the animals, thus committing a crime...Obviously, these pressures were always spoken and never written down.)

Today, in the article written by Margherita D’Amico on “La Repubblica”, it turns out that same centre bought some mules declared EIA-positive (they probably were not), made experiments for six months for a project financed by the Health Ministry and, in the end, sent them to the slaughterhouse. Outrageous.

And to think that, at the start of Rocket’s story, we thought it was a mistake in good faith, committed by a tad distracted laboratory. Instead it seems things are quite different.

So far we have always said the panic for the Equine Infectious Anemia is an hoax. Professor Passamonti, of Pisa University, expert in equines’ infectious diseases, states in fact, “In 2009, in Italy, EIA presence was on 0,14%, with only 117 cases of new positivity in 2011, mostly among the mules of the woodcutters in Abruzzo and Lazio. In such a quiet situation, I don’t see the reason for excessive zeal.”

Now, in the light cast by this last news, we almost feel compelled to use the word fraud to describe what is happening. To remove our doubts and to do justice, we will go on with our battle.

And the Ministry’s obstinate silence is now become embarrassing.