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THE WOOD-PIGEON DIPHTHERIA. 



BY 



C. B. TICEHUEST, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., M.B.O.U. 



As Wood-Pigeon diphtheria was so prevalent last winter 

 in various parts of England, and excited some interest 

 amongst sportsmen and ornithologists, a brief account of 

 this disease may be acceptable to readers of British 

 Birds. This complaint has been often referred to in 

 various journals, and several suggestions have been made 

 to account for it, but in none of these have I seen the real 

 cause of the disease stated. Like a great many diseases it 

 is due to a specific micro-organism, which was isolated by 

 Loffler in 1884 in Germany, from pigeons dead of the 

 disease, and called by him Bacillus diphtherue columharuni. 



The disease begins to reveal itself in red patches, 

 which appear first on the surface of the fauces and then 

 spread to the base of the tongue and pharynx, and even 

 a little way down the windpipe and gullet. Later these 

 patches become covered with a thick yellowish layer. 



The birds are said to have fever for two or three weeks, 

 and they gradually waste and die from the poisons manu- 

 factured by the bacilli, and not from inability to swallow, 

 as I have found birds in the last stages of the disease with 

 acorns in the crop ; moreover the post-mortem appearance 

 of the internal organs is that of death from poisoning. 



These bacilli, which I have cultivated from pigeons 

 dead of this disease, are short, rod-shaped bacilli, with 

 rounded ends, and belong to the same group as the bacilli 

 of rabbit septicsemia and fowl cholera. 



The disease occurs in those years in which hordes of 



