![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
(For those of you who don't know yet...here's my disclaimer: I live in Papua New Guinea, a third world tropical island nation north of Australia, that really was never intended to support horses. There are no vets here, no farriers, no physios, no chiros... no nothing. Not even stalls or hay. Equine nutrition is sketchy, but we've done the best we can by creating a personal mix of various minerals specific to our herd of 9 stock ponies and we've seen great improvement.)
This is a 26 year old QH mare who has two odd patches on her body: between her front legs (girth area) and on the right side of her crest in the middle of her neck. Both of them are behaving slightly differently, despite having been treated extensively, we’re getting no-where. Neither of them are rain rot/rain scald (which we deal with a lot here), nor do they appear to be Queensland Itch.
The one on the stomach is itchier of the two. It has lost hair in about a 4” diameter patch, but there are a few smaller spots as far away as 12” from the main spot. Some hair has grown back, actually, but in the middle of the hairless spot, it has developed blotchy black speckles on the skin (not like normal dark skin, but oddly colored spots). The skin is flaky.
The one on the crest is a 4” diameter spot with no hair (and again, spotted skin). It has strange lumps under the skin, which seem to shift and change position gradually (over a period of weeks). This one isn’t really as itchy as it used to be.
We’ve treated these for several months now, with no changes, and instead the one on the crest has grown. At first, they seemed like rainrot, so we attacked it in kind (we're rainrot experts here in the tropics...); we either use an effective herbal treatment from Zephyr’s garden or a potassium permagenate mixture. Both tend to clear it up right away. With this, it wasn’t working. In desperation, we’ve moved on to other things--we’ve tried antiseptic washing and normal washing, we’ve tried hydrocortisone creams, we’ve tried anti-itch creams (including stuff with zinc, like desitin), we’ve tried some other fungal treatment begged off our local clinic (whitfield’s ointment) and it doesn’t seem to be making any difference, despite twice-daily treatment.
Thoughts?