2 BULLETIN 65, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



in the following year the horses of Iowa were saul to have "died hke 

 rats." However, Kansas seems to have had more than her share of 

 this trouble, as a severe outbreak that extended over almost the entire 

 State occurred in 1891, w^hile m 1902 and agam m 1906 the disease 

 recurred with equal severity in various portions of the State. 



NOMENCLATURE. 



There has always been considerable discussion and criticism re- 

 garding the different names which have been given this malady, and 

 various terms have been apphed according as each author in past 

 outbreaks has considered certain symptoms or lesions as the para- 

 mount feature 'of the affection. Thus the disease has been termed 

 "cramp of the neck," ''head disease/' "mad staggers," "'sleepy staggers," 

 etc. Through the recent investigations of Grimm, Schmidt, and others 

 it has been quite definitely estabUshed that "head disease," Borna 

 disease, and cerebrospinal meningitis are one and the same, and 

 Hutyra and Marek have accepted this opinion and incorporated it 

 in their "Special Pathology." While at first the Borna disease was 

 considered as a form of cerebrospinal meningitis, the work of Johne 

 and Ostertag (1900) indicated that it was an independent disease, 

 because they failed to find any inflammatory changes in the central 

 nervous system. . Accepting this view, Friedberger and Frohner 

 have separated the two diseases in their "Theory and Practice," 

 basing their differential diagnosis chiefly on the absence of inflam- 

 mation in the brain and cord of Borna disease. However, since the 

 publication of this excellent work in 1904, Oppenheim, Dexler, 

 Schmidt, and others have shown conclusively that inflammatory 

 lesions are present in the central nervous system, although Dexler 

 has pointed out that in some cases it is necessary to make a sys- 

 tematic examination of a number of shdes to discover the inflanuna- 

 tory changes. As a result the more recent writers have adopted 

 the viewpoint that the two terms, Borna disease and cerebrospinal 

 meningitis, are synomTnous. 



When this disease appeared with such severity in certain sections 

 of the United States in the summer of 1912, there were a number of 

 persons who claimed that it was the Borna disease appearing in the 

 New World for the first time: others diagnosed it as a new horse 

 disease, as influenza, parasitism (due to the palisade worm), paralysis 

 similar to poUomyelitis (infantile paralysis) of man, epidemic cerebro- 

 spinal meningitis of man, and equine malaria from the fact that 

 mosquitoes were prevalent and the horses were in lowlands. These 

 erroneous diagnoses, wdide participated in to a certain extent by 

 some veterinarians, were usually the opinions of physicians, chem- 

 ists, bacteriologists who were not veterinarians, and others of limited 

 veterinary experience. However, the vast majority of veterinary 



