As soon as you give banamine, the WBC count is depressed in about 4-6 hours (along with the fever).
Animals, fortunately, haven't developed much resistance to antibiotics so far. They do have a fear of catching staph (and could be a MDRS) from their human handlers' hands during wound care handling, etc. Culturing animals for URI isn't common, and radiographing lungs is very difficult. Even an animal on antibiotic can have a culture taken, and the results interpreted in light of the MIC and drug dose the animal has been on, so antibiotics doesn't preclude subsequent culture if required. And that doesn't even address viral stuff.
This is stupid. If a trainer wants to scratch a horse, who cares? Sometimes
an animal is just "off", and the trainer justifiably trusts their sixth sense about not running the animal, even if there is no fever, no cough, no WBC depression or elevation, etc.
Nobody has business ordering a trainer (via intimidation) to run their horse.
My impression is the racing secretary can make the life of a trainer miserable in the future if it's a bad trainer habit to scratch constantly anyway(Cannon?)
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"Have the clean racing people run any ads explaining that giving a horse a Starbucks and a chocolate poppyseed muffin for breakfast would likely result in a ten year suspension for the trainer?" - Dr. Andrew Roberts
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