Lovell anxious to get barn back in action

Besides trainer Alice Cohn, whose horse had to be euthanized after it contracted the equine herpesvirus and got very sick on Christmas Day, no trainer at Fair Grounds has been harder hit by the ongoing herpes outbreak than Michelle Lovell.

Lovell is the main occupant of barn 14, which housed the deceased Cohn-trained horse, the first horse to test positive for EHV-1 at Fair Grounds. A second horse in the barn, trained by Jeff Thornbury, also got sick from EHV-1 and now is isolated on another part of the Fair Grounds backstretch.

Three other horses in different barns have tested positive for EHV-1, but they all carried the so-called “wild” subtype of the virus, and the only cases involving the more serious neuropathic subtype have occurred in barn 14. Barn 14 began a 14-day quarantine Dec. 26, the day of the first positive test, but that was restarted to Dec. 31 when the second horse tested positive there. The horses in the barn train after the rest of the Fair Grounds population has exercised, and they have not been allowed to race.

Lovell has been swept up in the situation only because of where her stalls happen to sit. None of her horses has tested positive, nor – knock on wood – have shown any sign of illness. Her meet had been going very well, four winners from 14 starters, but Lovell had to scratch seven entered horses after the quarantine hit and has been unable to enter any of her stock either.

“Obviously, the first concern is to keep the horses healthy, and everything is healthy,” Lovell said. “We’ve been taking our temps three times a day. I’ve put my horses on vitamins and supplements to stimulate their immune systems. We try to keep them out of stressful situations as much as possible. It’s been tough to take though. Some owners panic and just want to get their horses out of there. Something like this can really hurt a business.”

On Thursday, a little light shone at the end of the tunnel. The barn 14 quarantine expires next Friday if no new EHV-1 cases arise there, and on Thursday, Fair Grounds allowed Lovell to enter horses for that Jan. 13 card.

“It’s going to help seeing the horses in the entries, but we’ve still got some ways to go to get out of this,” said Lovell.

It has been three days since a horse tested positive for even the wild-type EHV-1 virus at Fair Grounds, and it has been nearly a week since the last positive in barn 14. The track was placed under a general quarantine – no horses in or out – starting Monday after a horse in the receiving barn ran a temperature and tested positive for the wild-type EHV-1. The next day, a horse in barn 47 also tested positive for that subtype of the virus.

The receiving barn quarantine expires Jan. 16, the barn 47 quarantine on Jan. 17, but no one is yet sure when Fair Grounds – if the track is fortunate enough to have no further EHV-1 cases – will come out of quarantine. A spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture, which is administering the quarantine, said in an e-mail Friday that “state, federal, and Louisiana Racing Commission veterinarians are meeting early next week to finalize the quarantine release plan.”

Lovell and everyone else at Fair Grounds is taking temperatures and keeping their fingers crossed.

◗ The EHV-1 quarantines and a sloppy, off-the-turf day gutted the Friday card, which had more than 30 horses scratched.