24-h sheltering behaviour of individually kept horses during Swedish summer weather

Provision of shelter for horses kept on summer pasture is rarely considered in welfare guidelines, perhaps because the benefits of shelter in warm conditions are poorly documented scientifically. For cattle, shade is a valued resource during summer and can mitigate the adverse effects of warm weather on well-being and performance. We found in a previous study that horses utilized shelters frequently in summer. A shelter with a roof and closed on three sides (shelter A) was preferred and can reduce insect pressure whereas a shelter with roof and open on three sides was not utilized. However, shelter A restricts the all-round view of a horse, which may be important for horses as flight animals. Therefore, we studied whether a shelter with roof, where only the upper half of the rear wall was closed (shelter B), would be utilized while maintaining insect protection properties and satisfying the horses’ sense for security. A third shelter was offered with walls but no roof (shelter C) to evaluate whether the roof itself is an important feature from the horse’s perspective. Eight Warmblood horses were tested each for 2 days, kept individually for 24 h in two paddocks with access to shelters A and B, or shelters A and C, respectively. Shelter use was recorded continuously during the night (1800–2400 h, 0200–0600 h) and the following day (0900–1600 h), and insect defensive behaviour (e.g., tail swish) in instantaneous scan samples at 5-min intervals during daytime

Analysis of the Respiratory Tract Morbidity in Children Living in Big Cities

Upper and lower respiratory tract pathology is an urgent problem of modern paediatrics since it is the most common paediatric disease. The aim was to conduct a retrospective analysis of the structure of respiratory diseases in children. Materials and methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of 5,615 medical records of patients undergoing inpatient treatment at the non-profit municipal enterprise City Children's Clinical Hospital in 2018 for respiratory system pathology. Retrospective analysis is performed using the electronic program "Doctor Eleks", which allows us to search and form a group of case histories by keyword. The age characteristics and the structure of the respiratory tract morbidity were defined, seasonal prevalence and duration of treatment, and the medical conditions requiring the longest inpatient treatment were determined. A judicious approach is required to the question of hospitalisation of a patient with respiratory pathology - it must be timely and well-founded because the presence of a respiratory pathology does not always require hospitalisation. There is a necessity in studying the causes of hospitalisation of children for respiratory pathology and retrospectively study the history and causes of re-hospitalisations to develop recommendations for reducing the incidence of hospitalisation. It is also planned to study the structure of hospitalised patients according to other nosologies (pathology of the digestive tract, urinary system, etc.) in the nearest future in order to propose an algorithm for optimising the processes of hospitalisation by differentiating visitors who actually need hospitalisation and those who may be in outpatient treatment