Horses running in jurisdictions that have put in place regulations allowing for voided claims have shown lower risks of fatal injuries in claiming races than before the rules were enacted, according to an epidemiologist who analyzes data in the Equine Injury Database. Dr. Tim Parkin, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at the University of Glasgow, presented data on the lower risks in the jurisdictions with the void-claim rules during a webinar Tuesday afternoon conducted as part of the Health and Safety of the Racehorse Summit, which had to be canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stressing that the analysis of the void-claim data was not as statistically rigorous as other analyses of specific risk factors gleaned from the database, Parkin still urged racing jurisdictions to consider the rules, given the difference between the fatal injury rates prior to and after enacting the rules. “There’s certainly no evidence that introduction of a void-claim rule can do any harm,” Parkin said. While Parkin declined to provide an explanation for the difference, Dr. Mary Scollay, executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium who was instrumental in the creation of the Equine Injury Database, said on the webinar that she believed the difference may be due to trainers “checking” their willingness to enter potentially unsound horses in claiming races due to the void-claim rules. “It’s causing the trainer to self-edit,” Scollay said. Void-claim rules typically allow an owner to cancel a claim of a horse if the horse does not finish a race, is vanned off, or presents as lame in the test barn after the race. The rules are in place in a number of racing jurisdictions, with most of the regulations being enacted in the last five years. Tuesday’s webinar was the last of five that the sponsor of the Health and Safety of the Racehorse Summit, the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation, scheduled for this year after the event had been canceled. Parkin has routinely appeared at the Summit in the past in order to provide updates on risk factors that have been generated from his analyses of the database, which was launched in 2009. Many of the identified risk factors have since been incorporated into racing-office software that flags certain horses for additional review prior to being entered into races. Many regulatory veterinarians believe that the flags have led to reduced incidents of fatal injuries in races, and in the past 10 years, the fatal injury rate at North American tracks has indeed declined by 23 percent since 2009, reflecting a reduction of 135 fatalities in 2019 when compared to a decade ago, according to Parkin’s analysis. “That is a significant improvement from where we were 10 years ago,” Parkin said. Parkin said Tuesday that horses entered in claiming races continue to show the greatest risk of fatal injury, when compared to other types of races. In an additional analysis of claiming horses conducted over the past 18 months, Parkin said that horses entered in claiming races face the most significant risks in their first starts for new trainers and in their first “four or five” starts as a claiming horse. Assessing the risk of a horse suffering a fatal injury is a difficult task given the rarity of the occurrence. The current rate, 1.53 per 1,000 starts, means that 99.847 percent of all horses do not suffer a fatal injury in a race. That also means that a 50 percent greater risk than average translates to a fatality rate of 2.25 per 1,000 starts, or, inversely, a safe percentage of 99.775. According to Parkin, additional analysis of the data also showed a correlation of higher risk among horses that received shock-wave therapy within 90 or 180 days of a race, and also when comparing horses that have never had the procedure and horses that have had a least one session of shock-wave therapy. Parkin also used part of his presentation to reiterate findings from a study conducted in Argentina that showed a significant increase in risk for fatal injuries for those horses that were declared to have been administered phenylbutazone prior to a race, compared to those that were not declared to have been administered the painkiller. He cited those results in calling for studies that would use veterinary records to determine if the same correlation existed in U.S. races. (Phenylbutazone is not allowed to be administered on race day in U.S. racing jurisdictions.) Parkin said that overall, having access to veterinary records would greatly improve his ability to conduct additional analyses of risk factors. Veterinary records in the United States are generally considered to be the property of the owner of the horse, but many racing organizations have been pushing for more transparency of the documents, and some jurisdictions have mandated that veterinary records be transferred to new owners if a horse is claimed. “It’s really a no-brainer,” Parkin said about having access to the veterinary records. He also said that having access to better training records for fatally injured horses could improve the analyses.