Jockey Club releases fatality statistics

The Jockey Club on Friday released an updated North American fatality rate

for Thoroughbreds that includes four years' worth of data collected in the

Equine Injury Database, the North American database for racing injuries.

Based on an analysis of 1,532,418 starts collected during the four-year

period January 1, 2009, through December 31, 2012, the prevalence of

race-related fatal injury was 1.92 per 1,000 starts. For individual years, the

prevalence of fatal injury per 1,000 starts was 2.00 for 2009, 1.88 for 2010,

1.88 for 2011, and 1.92 for 2012.

"The causes of racing injuries are often very complex and involve multiple

factors interacting together over time," said Dr. Tim Parkin, a veterinarian and

epidemiologist from the University of Glasgow, who serves as a consultant on the

Equine Injury Database and performed the analysis.

"While the fatality rate has remained fairly static over the course of the

past four years, the real significance today is that, with 1.5 million starts in

the database, we have now established a baseline and we can begin to analyze the

relationships between each of the individual factors. In the future, we will be

able to design interventions based on these data and recommend actions that will

reduce injuries and fatalities."

Only injuries that result in fatality within 72 hours or less from the date

of race are included in the national figures. It should also be noted that

statistics from previous years are sometimes updated due to the addition of

tracks or corrections in the EID fatality data originally submitted by

participating racetracks.

Parkin's analysis also found that:

Table 1 contains a four-year summary of statistics from the EID stratified

by categories of age, surface type and distance.

The Equine Injury Database contains a suite of reports for racetracks to

analyze data collected at their respective facilities. The Jockey Club also

maintains a website that enables racetracks to make public their data in a

standard, summary fashion

here.

Summaries of fatality statistics for a participating track include the year,

number of race days, number of starts, age of the horse, distance of the race

and the surface on which the incident occurred. A list of racetracks that have

signed up to participate in the Equine Injury Database, including those who are

now reporting their statistics publicly, can be found

here.

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