Commissioner of Agriculture 289 



sons who handle, treat or kill the sick animals, and the much 

 greater number that eat their products, comparatively very few 

 take the disease. Siegel, though engaged in research on the sub- 

 ject, records but 30 deaths in the human victims of aphthous fever 

 in two and one-half years. Hulin found 23 deaths among 1,000 

 human patients. Fischer says that with 5,500,000 animal victims 

 in Germany from 1887 to 1894 only GOO persons suffered. In the 

 human family, children are the most Sequent sufferers and are 

 liable to have the disease in its deadly intestinal form. 



Eeynal quotes many instances of the consumption of milk of 

 aphthous fever cows by large numbers of people, men, women and 

 children, without the development of a single case of the disease 

 in man, and he concludes that the milk is only infecting when the 

 contents of ruptured vesicles on the teats have been mingled with 

 it. Many prominent leaders in veterinary medicine endorse his 

 position, Toggis, Mathieu, Levrate, Magne, Kayer, Tisserant, 

 Zundel and others. Reynal himself closely watched for infection 

 from milk in the canton of Saint-Awold, where practically the 

 whole community drank the milk throughout an epizootic; on the 

 government farm of Vincennes when 100 cows passed through the 

 disease, the milk meanwhile being consumed in the Convalescent's 

 Home and the Maison de Sante, Charenton ; and in Alfort and its 

 environs, where the milk of the aphthous fever cows in the vet- 

 erinary school was taken experimentally for a w T eek, in quart doses 

 daily, by himself and twenty students as well as bv outsiders, 

 without a single indication of foot and mouth disease. Calves and 

 pigs placed in a separate building and fed on the milk from the 

 diseased cows escaped. He even drew the milk with teat tubes 

 from the badly affected udders of the cow and fed it to lambs 

 without any evil result. He very naturally concludes that the 

 positive infection of Hertwig, Mann and Vilain, and the many 

 others on record, were due to a complication of diseases, the 

 aphthous fever having, he opines, been complicated by false cow- 

 pox. The facts show clearly that large numbers of men, and even 

 animals, in areas of aphthous fever, are strongly resistant to that 

 disease, but in face of the experiment of Hertwig, and the very 

 many casual infections since, Reynal just as clearly errs in pro- 

 nouncing the milk innocuous. He fails to take into account the 



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