Bovine Tuberculosis 753 



disfigurement. It causes a large percentage of the rarer 

 types of alimentary tuberculosis requiring operative inter- 

 ference or causing the death of the child directly or as a 

 contributing cause in other diseases. 



In young children it becomes a menace to life and causes 

 from 6 J to 10 per cent, of the total fatalities from this disease. 



Prophylaxis. The prevention of tuberculosis in cattle is 

 a matter of vast sanitary importance. Not only have we 

 to consider the danger of infection from milk containing 

 tubercle bacilli, but also the inferior quality and diminished 

 usefulness of milk and flesh coming from animals that are 

 diseased. The extermination of bovine tuberculosis, there- 

 fore, becomes imperative, and the utmost efforts should be 

 made to bring it about. Several separate measures must 

 be considered: 



1. Improvement in the methods of diagnosis, by which 

 the recognition of the disease is made possible before its 

 ravages are great. This is rapidly coming about with in- 

 creasing information regarding the use and abuse of tu- 

 berculin, etc. 



2. Means by which infected animals shall be destroyed. 

 Here the municipal and state governments furnish inade- 

 quate funds to make possible the destruction of diseased 

 cattle without adequate compensation an injustice to the 

 unfortunate owner. 



3. Means of preventing the infection of healthy ani- 

 mals. In many places this is being achieved with brilliant 

 success by separation of the herd, healthy and newly born 

 animals constituting one part, suspicious animals the other. 

 By these means valuable breeding animals can be kept for 

 a time, at least, in usefulness. A second and less successful 

 means of preventing infection is by means of prophylactic 

 vaccination of the healthy animals with dead cultures, 

 modified living cultures, or by bacteriotoxins made by com- 

 minuting them. 



Experiments of this kind have been conducted by Mc- 

 Fadyen,* on a large scale by von Behring, f by Pearson 

 and Gilliland, t Calmette and Guerin, and by Theobald 



c "Jour. Comp. Path, and Therap.," June, 1901. 



f "Beitrage zur experimentellen Therapie," 1902, Hft. 5. 



| "Jour, of Comp. Med. Vet. Archiv," Nov. 1902, "Univ. of Penna. 

 Med. Bull.," April, 1905. 



"Ann. de 1'Inst. Pasteur.," Oct., 1905, May, 1906, and July, 1907; 

 and "International Congress on Tuberculosis," Washington, 1908. 

 48 



