174 GENERAL THERAPEUTICS FOR VETERINARIANS 



therefore, difficult to make up a comparative table of the individual 

 drugs. It can only be stated in a very general way that the strong- 

 est disinfectants, which also destroy spores, are corrosive sublimate 

 and the silver salts (silver nitrate); chlorine, bromine and iodine; 

 creolin, lysol and some of the other newer cresol preparations; 

 formaldehyde and wood tar. Contrasting with these are the 

 weaker antiseptics, which kill only the spore-free bacteria: coal 

 tar, carboUc acid, salicylic acid, aniline dyes, boric acid, calcium, 

 lyes and acids. Iron sulphate and sulphuric acid, formerly highly 

 valued as antiseptics, possess almost no antiseptic properties. 

 The aforementioned disinfectants are arranged in the following 

 table according to the dilutions in which they are efficient, the 

 dilutions given being the average of the different bacteriological 

 observations; 



Resistance of the Individual Infectious Agents. — This is very 

 variable. Many infectious agents are very readily destroyed by 

 disinfectants. As a consequence, for many of the infectious diseases 

 the employment of the weaker disinfectants (lime, soap, tar) is 

 sufficient. This is due in part to the fact that many of the patho- 

 genic organisms do not form spores. The infectious agents which 

 are easily destroyed are the anthrax bacilli, the bacilli of swine 

 erysipelas, the bacteria of hemorrhagic septicaemia of cattle, the 

 bacteria of fowl cholera, and the virus of foot-and-mouth disease, 

 vesicular exanthema, pox and rinderpest. On the other hand, 



