Panel sessions from the 2003 Joint Annual
Meeting of HTA, Thoroughbred Racing
Associations and Racetracks of Canada
held in Hollywood, Florida, March 13-14, 2003

The Hunt for Red October:
Finding the Undetectables

Mr. Stan Bergstein: Scot, could you tell us a little bit about the consortium—about its goals, its efforts and its progress.

Dr. Scot Waterman:  December 2001, the day prior to the annual symposium on racing in Tucson, the American Association of Equine Practitioners held a facilitated, closed-door meeting.  It invited 23 industry stakeholder groups to sit down and determine whether or not there was enough agreement between these groups to ever begin the process of developing uniform medication rules for the country.

Fortunately, since I’m sitting here today, the answer was yes.  There was enough agreement that day; there was enough progress that day, to have the hope that this thing was possible.

Last year this group, that now reaches 26, met three additional times face-to-face.  We’ve already met once this year, as well.  We are newly incorporated; we are applying for a 501(c)(3) charitable status with the IRS.

If I were to boil down our goals into two, I would say number one is the development of uniform medication rules for the United States.  Number two ties into number one, and it also ties into what Dr. McKeever is going to be talking about here shortly, and that is to create a pot of money that will be available to researchers on an annual basis.  They know it’s going to be there, and they can then use it for research that helps us in putting together this model medication policy.  It would be research on known therapeutic medications, and also research on developing new testing methodologies for those substances that we currently can’t detect.

Dr. McKeever, I’m sure you went through the process of trying to get money originally for the work you’ve done on erythropoetin, and it’s not an easy task, because there’s no national source of this money.  There are pockets of it, but there’s no one group in particular that these guys can go to get funding.

So, those are sort of the two main goals, obviously that’s very vague, but for the time being that suffices, I’m sure, we’ll get into it a little deeper.

Mr. Bergstein:  Dr. Weber, can you give us a little overview of the situation in Canada as far as the subject matter we’re talking about this morning.

Dr. Michael Weber:   In Canada we have a lot of the same problems, but we’re not responsible for all the problems across North America with respect to drugs and medications in horses.  We do have a uniform testing program coast-to-coast.  And it’s been in effect basically forever.

We do have a reasonable funding program in Canada—I guess you can never have too much, but our funding is stable.  It’s a levy on pari-mutuel wagering, so the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency, which is the federal body that regulates pari-mutuel wagering, takes 8/10ths of one percent of every dollar bet in Canada.

Out of that 8/10ths of one percent, we get our share for drug control service, which includes day-to-day testing at the tracks as well as research.

As I said, the program is constant from coast-to-coast.  We have two laboratories only, that do all of the testing.  We test about 55,000 to 58,000 samples a year—samples being horses.  So, blood and urine we consider as one sample if it comes from the same horse.

We’re doing basically the same level of testing at all tracks.  We have been in a position for the last 21 years of establishing and providing elimination guidelines for therapeutic agents.  We publish a booklet that is available to anyone—owners, trainers, veterinarians, regulators, and fans.

The most recent edition of this book that came out in July of 2002, and contains elimination guideline information on, I think 106 or 107 substances now, medications.

At the other end of the scale, we have the same serious problems with detecting new and difficult drugs, as Scot has referred to.  We’re just as concerned about erythropoetin or EPO as anyone else; I don't know how big a problem it is in Canada, although it is a problem, because we don’t have a definition.

We haven’t, up until now at least, had any way of evaluating or doing a quantitative or a qualitative study as to how much is being used in the industry.

I’ve been in my position for 23 years, and I have a certain rapport with trainers, veterinarians and owners that I have established over these years, and I value their input and feedback greatly.

In the late '80s, early '90s, erythropoetin was a topic of discussion as well.  It seemed to go away, from my perspective.  Trainers used it and they didn’t get a bang for their buck.

Through the early to mid-'90s, I didn’t hear much of erythropoetin.  Then in the last couple of years, it came to the front stage again, and there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a considerable amount of erythropoetin that has been used on the horses.  Whether it does them any good or not, I’m not here to argue.

I think from my point of view, as a veterinarian closely associated with chemists, it is a different ball of wax than what we’ve dealt with in the past.  These are protein-based drugs.  Most of our analytical chemists do not have that kind of expertise, and we’re, frankly, looking for help around the world.  I guess just the same as everybody around the world is.

We’re using Dr. McKeever’s new ELISA.  Hopefully it’ll give us at least a better handle on the extent of the problem, if nothing else.

Mr. Bergstein:  Dr. McKeever, tell us a little bit about your work with Dr. George Maylin on this.

Dr. McKeever:  The whole goal of what we do at Rutgers is to make happier, healthier horses, and extend their racing life and their life as pleasure animals.  We have a breadth of the industry that covers the full gamut of athletic activities, but some of the work that we do looks at different drugs in performance.

Just as a review, erythropoetin is a protein hormone produced by the kidney.  It’s a miracle drug.  It cures life-threatening anemias in end-stage renal disease patients in humans and chemotherapy patients, but it’s also a threat both to human and equine sports medicine.  The integrity of sports is compromised when people use drugs to cheat.  It’s also a dangerous drug.  It heightens blood viscosity, which in human sports medicine they think that’s why athletes have died of strokes and heart attacks after cycling races and endurance races.

The horse molecule is very similar; the horse develops antibodies to the foreign protein.  Even though it’s very similar, there’s a slight difference, and in some cases the horses will actually attack their own EPO and shut down production of red blood cells, become severely anemic, and in cases, die.  So it is a threat both to the integrity and the welfare of the sport.

Essentially, there are a lot of things that go into athletic performance, and it’s the hemoglobin concentration here that’s being affected by EPO.  You’re producing more red blood cells—the protein in the red blood cell that carries oxygen is hemoglobin.

The ultimate goal is to get oxygen from the atmosphere and the lungs down to the working muscles, and in the lab, as a physiologist, what we’ll look at is what’s called maximal aerobic capacity, or VO2max.  We’ll typically take horses up on a treadmill test, and we’ll take them up incrementally until we see a plateau in the uptake of oxygen.  Now horses can run more, but they’re going to pay for that activity with anaerobic metabolism, which is like paying for it with $100 bills, where the aerobic metabolism, using oxygen, is like paying for it in pennies.

I’m a cheap son-of-a-gun, so I like paying for things with pennies rather than the high-cost activities.

When you start exercise, oxygen uptake goes up, but it doesn’t reach a plateau for a delayed time.  So there’s an oxygen debt that’s occurring here.  If you have more red blood cells, and you can carry more oxygen faster, you’re not going to incur as much of an oxygen debt.  Also, it’s going to enhance recovery from the exercise, so EPO has the potential not only to increase the maximal aerobic capacity of a horse, but also get them up there to that max faster and enhance their recovery.

The two basic questions we’ve had are: does EPO work, and can we detect it? As far as the first question, as late as last year, I heard some colleague saying that, “EPO won’t work in the horse; there’s no data out there.” Well, they hadn’t read my abstract, so they hadn’t seen the data.

With one study, we used splenectomized horses.  The horse, as you probably know, has a huge spleen.  The horse is a natural blood doper, and the spleen squeezes down at the beginning of exercises about 12 liters of red-cell-rich blood.  That’s why some people have questioned whether EPO would actually work.

When I taught at Ohio State, we had horses that were splenectomized, and we gave EPO to them, and we had a second control test just to confirm that we had repeatability.  We gave the drug for three weeks at a very, very low dose—15 IU per kilogram three times a week for three weeks.  The starting dose for renal disease patients is around 150 IU per kilogram three times a week.

Essentially what we saw was that hematocrit, or the ratio of red blood cells in plasma, which is an indicator of red cell status in the hemoglobin, both increased with the treatment.

The interesting thing was, we saw a highly significant increase in blood viscosity, like you see in humans, which could potentially be dangerous to the horse.

Now hematocrit is just a ratio, so the better thing to measure is the total number of red cells in the body.

We looked at the actual volumes of red cells—the plasma and the blood volume—and we’ve demonstrated very nicely that in these splenectomized horses, red cell volume goes up, but because the body wants to keep blood pressure and blood volume in check, it actually decreased plasma volume, and you can see your blood volume actually went down.  But they had more red cells to carry oxygen.

As far as enhancing markers of performance…the oxygen uptake is significantly enhanced with the EPO.

So people came back at us, and they said, “Well, those are splenectomized horses.  Who cares? They’re not going to be running on the track.” So we came back with another study that I did at Rutgers where we looked at Standardbred horses.  We gave a little bit of a higher dose, 50 IU per kilogram.  We piggybacked on the study our detection study, and we wanted to definitely have antibodies produced.  This was also a dose that we had heard people have moved up to.

We had two groups, treatment and control.  The control got saline; the treatment got AmGen’s nice product.  We did a series of graded exercise tests, where we took the horses up incrementally, and measured their cardiovascular function.  We measured the blood volume yet again, and did this pre- and post-treatment.

Horses are magnificent athletes.  They recover super-fast from exercise, but the faster that happens, the better off they’re going to be for getting back into another race down the line.

Like the other study, we saw an increase both in resting and peak hematocrits.  Post-treatment, a resting hematocrit here in the control horses, is in the mid- to upper 30s; it’s up here in the 50s as far as the mean in the treatment horses.  Some of these horses were up in the 70s.  Those horses were pushing sludge through their blood vessels at that time.

As far as the vascular volumes, this is a similar response to what we saw before.  Blood volume actually goes down, but red cell volume and the ability to carry oxygen goes up.  The evidence for that is in our saline control group.   There was no difference in oxygen-carrying capacity due to the treatment, but when we look at the Epogen-treated group, there’s a substantial increase in the ability to transport oxygen, which is going to enhance performance, because it’s going to offset going to the lactic acid metabolism.

It’s going to have a higher aerobic capacity and recovery’s going to be faster.

Another way to look at it is the velocity at VO2 max was actually increased, so they were able to do more work on the treadmill, which translates if they’re running on the track, to being able to do more work on the track.  And their recovery was enhanced, so the horses that got Epogen, they recovered much faster from the exercise.

So we considered that low doses of EPO, increase red-cell volume and enhance aerobic capacity and markers performance, but don’t enhance the lactate and anaerobic side of things.

Some of the excuses that come up for high EPO readings are: what if I take my horse to altitude? Or what happens when you acutely train that horse? Do you get an increase in EPO that might affect any tests that are out there?

A colleague of mine out at Cal Poly-Pomona took horses up to 13,000 feet, and we looked at the affects of altitude.  And the only increase in EPO we saw was on the first day at altitude, and then things came back down to normal.  These horses were also tested for exercise effects at sea level, at altitude, and then at sea level again.  We saw no effect of exercise either at sea level or at altitude.

The acute exercise doesn’t seem to affect EPO in the horse, which is critical for measuring EPO levels, someone might say, “Well, my horse exercised, so its EPO should have been up.”

The second question was, can we detect EPO? This has been a joint project.  People around the world have been giving information; folks at AmGen actually were helping until their lawyers told them to pull up the ladder and not give any more information to us.

One possible detection method that has been bounced around, is measuring EPO concentration.  The half-life of EPO in the natural system is only minutes, depending on how you give it.  In hours or a couple days it’s gone, and most people that are using the drug know that they can give the drug and the red blood cells last for 120 days.

If you stimulate the bone marrow with EPO in humans, they put out an immature red blood cell that’s easy to spot.  Well, this doesn’t happen in the horse, so that’s not a viable marker.  That’s one of the things they use in humans.

Looking at red-cell indices, the horse is a natural blood doper.  The spleen can contract, and that can send hematocrit up.  Some horses, Arabians in particular, if you look at them cross-eyed, their spleen will contract on down.  So that gives you an excuse.  “Well, the horse is excited when they do the blood sample, and therefore the red-cell indices, you know, aren’t viable for going into a court case.”

Antibodies to EPO may be the answer as Epogen is a foreign substance.  A horse shouldn’t produce an antibody to Epogen unless it’s seeing that drug.  And the test we’ve come up with looks at the antibodies to EPO.

Another test we’re working on is the plasma transferon receptor.  Transferon molecules grab the iron that you take in the diet, and they stick it into the blood cell.  Those receptors go up within hours after getting EPO, and they stay up for weeks after the doses of EPO.  So it’s a potential secondary and confirmatory marker.

The rest of the detection studies used our two groups that I mentioned before.  For the exercise study; we either gave saline or EPO.  We collected blood before each treatment period, before each injection, and out to 123 days, so we looked at things over the course of a red blood cell—how long it would live.

If we look at hematocrits, they go up over time, and we start seeing things go up at about the third week of our scheme of injections.  So EPO doesn’t work right away.  When people bang in a single dose of EPO, it’s not probably going to have an effect.  It will start challenging them with the foreign protein, and if someone does that repeatedly, they will start producing antibodies.  But keep in mind that we see the hematocrits going up, but it isn’t until about three weeks in our injection phase that we saw them up significantly.  And then things come down during this period of post-injection, but it takes a long time for those red blood cells to be metabolized and turned over.

In our four EPO horses before they started getting the drug, and there was no antibody difference, statistically.  But by the third injection, we had a substantial increase in the number of antibodies that are produced.

So we have a way to spot horses that have been given the EPO, by the antibodies that they’re producing.

Dr. Maylin did another study at Cornell where they gave one injection per week for four weeks.  After the third injection, they saw a substantial increase in antibody production.

They did a population study, and there are well over 50,000 samples now.  They spotted one in 1,000 Thoroughbreds and six in 1,000 Standardbreds that had positives using this test.

One of the questions that came up was: is the test specific to horses? Phil Ormer and the New Jersey State Police Lab have been testing serum from other species—rabbit, goat, horse, sheep, bovine, dog, chicken, mouse and humans—and what he’s essentially found is that the assay is very specific for horse. So that answers a question and criticism that’s been floating around out there.

Plasma transference, that’s work that’s in progress, but the thought is, these go up within hours after giving EPO and stay up for a week. They won’t normally go up unless you have severe blood loss—unless a horse is losing 30 percent of its blood volume, which is highly unlikely. In most bleeders it’s a trickle at best. They’re not going to have an increase of plasma transferon receptors.

There may be an increase at altitude, but that’s only very small, and you can track where a horse has been; the only other reason for those to go up is EPO administration. This is a secondary test that we hope we’ll have within the next few months.

Mr. Bergstein:  Is this going to require out-of-competition testing?

Dr. McKeever:  I think out-of-competition testing would be a great thing to do for a whole host of drugs. Right now, this testing, if they have a post-race sample, they could detect it there; if they have a pre-race sample, they can detect things there.

If they go to the out-of testing scheme, you can say that EPO is a health problem for the horse—the horse is producing antibodies that could be a problem, and therefore write the racing laws so that there’s a scratch rather than a post-race thing that gets into all sorts of adjudication.

Mr. Bergstein:  Translating all of that into practical terms, does EPO move a horse up?

Dr. McKeever:  Move it up as far as performance? I’d say yes. It’s enhancing aerobic capacity.

Mr. Bergstein:  The next question, obviously, is one, and this is one I think is overlooked by horsemen to a large degree in using some of these things: What could be the adverse effects on the horse itself?

Dr. McKeever:  Well, the two side effects that I mentioned earlier. If you increase blood viscosity, you run a greater risk of creating clots and having problems go on in the small vessels, like in the heart, the brain and the kidney. So you could have an infarction that causes death.

The other problem, and the major problem in the horse, is the production of antibodies that then attack the horse’s own EPO, and they become so anemic that it threatens their life. They have to be supported with transfusions and kept alive until they can get rid of the antibodies, and…it takes a couple hundred days to get rid of all the antibodies.

Dr. Waterman:  And that, to a degree, is Russian roulette, is it not? I mean, you could never predict which horse would react that way.

Dr. McKeever:  Right. And that’s the thing that we’re still hunting for. There was a trial that was done at Ohio State using dogs and cats, sponsored by AmGen, and they saw 30 percent of the dogs and cats crash like horses do.

Mr. Bergstein:  Out-of-competition testing, of course, is a regulatory matter more than it is a veterinary matter, but what are your views on the necessity of it, and what are your views on whether it can be attained or not?

Dr. Waterman:  We are addressing it. As part of our discussions around the development of the model policy, obviously the discussion on out-of-competition testing is part of that policy document. We are trying to figure out the most equitable way of approaching it that would preserve due process for those people that have been selected for out-of-competition testing.

I think that we can come up with something that’s fair to everybody, that does the job that we require it to do. One of the more important things, when we talk about out-of-competition testing, is that we need to be able to define exactly what we’re testing for, so that everybody knows going in that we’re looking for A, B and C, and that’s it.

It’s not going to be a crapshoot looking for all different kinds of therapeutic medications. It’s going to be focused on specific drugs that we’re not going to be able to detect with the standard post-race testing.

Mr. Bergstein:  Aside from EPO, what are some of the really dangerous things that you may be looking for and can’t find currently? Or are you looking for anything that can’t be found, other than EPO?

Dr. Waterman:  This is the first year that we have put a list of research priorities out to researchers. We have established this year a research program; part of that research program is focused on those particular drugs that we have heard of and view as credible threats.

It is heavily dominated, I would say, at least this year, by those blood-doping agents—EPO and darbepoetin, which is the next generation erythropoetin. There are other blood substitutes that are on the market. Perflourocarbons are essentially in this same category, so those are some of the areas that we’re focused on this year.

Mr. Bergstein:  One of the questions that the consortium’s going to have to address is what appears at times to be internecine warfare between academics at various universities—the jealousies and the petty animosities that plague research, I presume from a layman’s point of view. Do you think you can overcome that?

Dr. Waterman:  Yes, I think we can. We can develop strategies whereby we get people working together without necessarily realizing they’re working together.

Scientists are by nature opinionated. They hold their own views; they clutch them like grim death. And they’re willing to fight for their views.

That is a good thing and a bad thing. What we have to do is try to figure out how to bring the good out without necessarily exposing the bad.

Mr. Steven Edwards:  With the methodologies that we’ve heard, and I presume that there’s no one ELISA test of some kind. What are the chances of that test standing up in a hearing or in a court? Also, what is the stability of the split sample if that split sample is not tested for some 30 or 60 days after it has been taken, which of course, again relates to the possibility of having a positive stand up in a court?                                                                                                                                             

Dr. McKeever:  The samples that were run that I showed you the data from with the antibodies, those things were in my minus-80 freezer for probably about five years. They were very stable once they were in the freezer.  As far as holding up in court, I think New Jersey and New York are going to an approach that EPO is a health problem. And they’re testing the samples and notifying people before they go to a race. If they’re positive, I think New York State, has rewritten their racing laws so that they can scratch them beforehand, and it doesn’t have to go to a court trial.

Ultimately, people are probably going to challenge things in court, and if the science is good, it should hold up in court.

Dr. Weber:  Steven, this is another ELISA in the broader group of ELISAs. We would never go to a hearing or call a positive test on an ELISA detection for any other drug alone. We would have to have supportive data. At the same time, it certainly is the great first step here.  I do have a question myself to Dr. McKeever: Do all horses produce antibodies to recombinant human erythropoetin?

Dr. McKeever:  I’d have to go by the statistics of our study; of the four horses that got EPO, all four produced antibodies. To answer that question, I’d say a more widespread study would have to be done to look at the incidence of antibody production. And that’s something that would be nice to have funded by another agency. Looking at the population studies, those are strictly giving a snapshot of what’s in the population right now. It’s not giving cause-and-effect. But one would presume that there are going to be different degrees of antibody production to that foreign protein.

Dr. Weber:  And that may relate to dose and frequency of dosing as well?

Dr. McKeever:  It could, but then if it’s not supposed to be in the system, and it’s a foreign protein, then it doesn’t matter what the dose.

Dr. Weber:  I agree 100 percent. If it’s there, it shouldn’t be there, because it’s a foreign protein. From my experience, we have not been able to generate antibodies to recombinant human erythropoetin in all of our horses. Which I would expect, I guess, because there’s no vaccine in the world that everyone would produce antibodies to.

Mr. Bennett Liebman:  If there’s already a second generation of EPO-related drugs, does this mean that Dr. Maylin’s test for this is already outdated?

Dr. McKeever:  The other generations of EPO are slight variations on the molecule. EPO is both a protein and there’s a carbohydrate that changes shape; Dr. Maylin is looking at the other molecules that are out there. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data from that.

Mr. Liebman:  So we really don’t yet have a test for EPO, or EPO-related things? Everybody knows that they can move on to the other type of drugs and avoid detection right now.

Dr. McKeever:  My guess would be, and this is pure speculation, that if the human recombinant erythropoetin is different enough in the horse to get an antibody response, then darbepoetin would be different enough as well to get an antibody response. So I’m guessing the same test would probably pick up both, but it’s a guess.

Mr. Liebman:  Just a suggestion—if this is truly a health problem, then perhaps the best way to handle it is to avoid all the problems we have with the administrative regulatory system of horse racing and put it either in a criminal jurisdiction, or ship it over to the Departments of Agriculture in each state. Have them enforce it, which would get it away from the racing commissions; it’d probably be a more equitable way, and certainly a swifter way to handle the problem.

Dr. Weber:  Another suggestion is to look at where the source of drug is coming from. In New Jersey we’ve got ads on the TV for PetRX.com, and a host of other places where you can get drugs for your dogs and cats. I went on their Web site about a month and a half ago, and you can get EPO from PetRX.com.

I called them up and I was pretending I was a horse trainer. I said, “If my vet writes a script, can I get EPO from you folks?” They said, “Sure.” Then I told them all the problems with EPO, and they said, “We don’t care.” So you know, that side of things has to be regulated from the state as well, prevent, you know, the stuff getting into the industry. Just in preparation for this meeting, I did a Web search looking at Mexican pharmacies on-line, and found at least half a dozen sites where I could have ordered erythropoetin—Epogen, or Procrit, which are the two trade names—for a couple hundred bucks without a script. No script needed.

I’m quite certain that if you went to a border pharmacy across the border in Texas or Arizona, you could buy it, no questions asked.

Mr. Lonny Powell: I didn’t know what EPO was until I arrived in Lexington, and now I spend a little part of every day on it. We’re one of Ken McKeever’s primary sponsors. Dr. Waterman and I have a very close relationship, and I applaud what’s being said. I applaud the progress. We’ve come a long way, but just to make it clear, until there is a definitive post-race test for the substance of EPO, from a clear regulatory approach, there is very little that can be done that you can hang your hat on in the arena of law and regulation.

Antibodies are great. They give us great suspicion. Horses that test either out of competition testing or some other means that show exposure to EPO or the antibody can certainly be monitored. Their connections, their trainers, particularly their vets, can be monitored, investigations can take place. Enforcement of the prohibited practice provision against administration and possession could kick in. But until there’s a definitive post-race test, and that’s what we’re ultimately hoping Ken and all of his colleagues will get to, we have not solved this problem. There’s still great debate out there as to whether all horses will show the antibody.

We know one of the big problems is, until we can get a definitive post-race test, we can’t exactly say when the horse had it administered, and if it’s a claiming horse that’s changing hands, we can’t necessarily peg the actual connections that were responsible. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and I certainly applaud the progress that’s taken place, but we’re not there yet in the typical way that we in this industry are used to dealing with prohibited substances.

After the ARCI proposed the prohibited practices provision for EPO and other blood-doping substances, virtually every jurisdiction in the country, within about a six months period of time, adopted such. I say that is a beacon of light for hopeful uniformity in other areas.

Dr. Waterman:  I’ll take a stab just at the post-race testing angle for EPO. And Dr. McKeever can correct me if I make any mistakes here, but as I understand it, there are direct tests for human erythropoetin. You can actually detect human erythropoetin in horse urine. The French have been working on that for a number of years.

The difficulty with it is, that it will only detect human erythropoetin in horse urine for, at best, 72 hours after it’s been administered. That is a significant problem for us, because this product is being administered to horses typically several weeks before a performance. And that is because the way this drug works—it's not an overnight process.

This direct test is essentially worthless for us in the typical post-race setting. The question then becomes whether or not we have the capability—the actual technology—to look for this product with a longer window and closer to when it’s actually being administered to the horse. In my discussions, we don’t have that capability yet.

Dr. Weber:  I agree with Scot. In our hands, the other ELISA for erythropoetin, the RND ELISA, which actually detects the drug, works well. It works well every time I give erythropoetin to a horse, but it’s only for a short period of time. I’m comfortable at 48 hours to 72. Some people stretch it to 96. I think the fact that RCI and their related organizations have placed these in a prohibited practice and possession mode has certainly slowed the trade in Canada. Things are coming together.

Dr. McKeever:  If the racing law is written in a way that people come together and agree here’s how we’re going to do things, like what they’re doing in New York where they’re testing the horses ahead of time. They’re spotting the antibody; they’re notifying people that their horse may be in jeopardy of a health risk, and the horses are being pulled out of racing. If it’s written so that horses in racing right now, a grandfather clause, then that could handle some of the claimer issues. After that, its buyer beware. Perhaps test your horse before you claim it, and if it’s got antibodies, don’t take it. There are ways around things.