In all such cases autotherapy by the steril ized virus is the rational and safe resort.
Tick Fever (Southern Cattle Fever).— In the splendid enterprise of extirpating this by dipping again and again, all cattle in the in fected district (embracing whole States) are cleared. But as a means to this end the cattle of a district were driven at regular intervals to a place where the baths had been con structed, dropping there and on the roadways the eggs of the liver fluke (Distoma hepaticum and lanceolatum), thereby infesting the land, the water and slugs and laying the foundation for a plague of flukes in the locality, a con tinuous infestment of the farm animals, a de preciation of values and ruinous losses in sheep especially, and only less so in cattle, pigs and other mammals. • Similarly, the opportunity was given for stocking the land and water with germs of anthrax, black leg, tetanus and other plagues, the germs of which survive outside the body. See CATTLE-TICK.
Tuberculosis.— The most widely prevalent and intractable plague of animals, largely be cause it is often concealed through lack of obvious symptoms, through the variety of or gans attacked in different animals, so that the victims may appear to be in rugged health and yet continually spread the germ. Many of them can be easily traded off on an unsuspect ing customer and will go on unsuspected in the new herd dealing their deadly gift all around, and especially to pigs, through feeding in common or in succession with cattle. In i hidden cases germs are preserved in the hard, fibrous tubercle, in the softened and caseated masses and even in partially calcified ones, and, finally, there is no effective legislation nor ad ministration for its suppression. Tubercles ap pear in the throat, the lungs and their covering, on the inner side of the ribs and spine, on the heart and pericardium, on the generative or gans, stomach, liver, pancreas, peritoneum or in any gland or gland group throughout the body (superficial or deep), in bones or joints, in the brain or its coverings—indeed, any where throughout the body. The• majority in an infected herd may escape detection, unless the tuberculin test is applied to all The most simple procedure is to put a drop of tuberculin under the lower eyelid in each animal. If next day that eye is red, inflamed and watering while the other eye has escaped, there is good ground for suspicion and all animals showing this should be separated from others and at once, or better, after a week or two, should have a half-dram of tuberculin injected under the loose skin of the neck or side. The tem
perature of each animal taken just before the test to give a normal should be recorded and after eight hours the body temperature should be taken every hour for 12 hours. Any rise above the normal from 103.5° to 106° F. would condemn any subject that had also showed the congested eye. All such should be killed if the aim is to stamp out the disease. The cow* stable should be disinfected with good, fresh bleaching powder, together with mangers, racks and drinking troughs. The remainder of the herd should be tested yearly or half yearly and reactors removed and killed.
In case of thoroughbred reactors, valuable mainly for their high-priced calves, they may be kept in thoroughly secluded premises and well-fenced pastures, their calves should be taken from them as soon as born and brought up on the milk of sound cows (or on their dams', first thoroughly sterilized by boiling). Such calves should be kept rigidly apart from other animals, in disinfected premises and safely fenced pastures. They should be tested when one year old.
Protozoa are microscopic (or ultramicro scopic) animal parasites, as bacteria are minute vegetable parasites. Some diseases, above re ferred to, are caused by protozoa in the blood, lymph, tissues and liquids of the host, and others, especially the ultravisible, have been suspected of belonging to this class; blackhead in the turkey and the duster masses of cells (Coccidia) on the skin and in internal organs of birds and mammals, amoeba: of the intestinal contents, pirosoma (piroplasma) of Texas fever and the small piroplasma of the Rhodesian East Coast tick fever. Suspected of being protozoa are the ultravisible germs of hydrophobia, hog cholera, foot and mouth disease, lung plague, rinderpest, cowpox, sheep pox, contagious cerebro-spinal meningitis, chicken pest, contagious epithelioma, etc. Some of these have been treated by weakened germs (unsterilized autotherapy), but where they are extremely fatal and controlled very uncertainly by the mitigated virus it is more rational to employ the sterilized germ, blood and antitoxins, etc. (sterilized autotherapy), rather than to run the risks of mistaken diag nosis and the resulting introduction of an unknown disease.