III. CONGENITAL INFECTIONS OF FOALS 



The basic principles that any infections existing within 

 the gravid uterus may invade the embryo or fetus, and may, 

 if they fail to kill the intra-uterine young, persist in the new- 

 born and cause fatal or dangerous illness, apply with the 

 same force in foals as in other mammals. The manifesta- 

 tions of intra-uterine infection in the foal present interest- 

 ing variations in clinical behavior without violating any 

 fundamental principle. 



A. Septicemia of the Foal 



When an equine fetus becomes critically infected but is 

 born, it is weak, listless, can not get up, and, if helped to its 

 feet, may be unable to stand. If born unattended and a 

 fragment of amnion chances to be upon its nose, perhaps it 

 is too weak to free itself and dies with the frail membrane 

 lying over or about its nostrils, leading to the popular error 

 that foals often smother in the amnion. While a moribund 

 foal may so perish, such an occurrence with a healthy foal 

 is extremely improbable. No studies have been made of the 

 temperature of the new-born foal suffering from septicemia, 

 but it is probably elevated. The sepsis generally ends fatally 

 within a few to twenty-four hours and the post mortem 

 study reveals substantially the same lesions as those ob- 

 served in calves. 



B. Retention of the Meconium 



Calves, and most other new-born mammals which bear se- 

 rious infection from the uterus, generally show a marked 

 and early tendency to dysentery. In harmony with the nor- 

 mal dryness of the feces in the large intestines and rectum, 

 alike of the fetus and of the adult, the foal often shows a 

 pathologic impaction of the rectum with very hard masses 

 of meconium. At first the foal may appear healthy or at 

 most merely a trifle dull, but after taking milk there appear, 

 at from twelve to forty-eight hours after birth, symptoms 



