ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 297 



ing scale which gives the owner the dead value of a dairy cow instead of 

 the living value, fixed from her appearance at the time of appraisal as 

 the law intended. 



Our report would not be complete without some reference to Bulletin 

 No. 1 on Tuberculosis and the Tuberculin Test, issued by the State Board 

 of Live Stock Commissioners an March 29,1900, and incorporated in their 

 annual report for the year ending October 31st, 1899. We believe it to 

 be a most unwise, unfair, and misleading document, in that it gives but 

 one side of the question and that greatly overdrawn. 



The question of transmissibility of tuberculosis from animal to man 

 is still unsettled. Many investigators claiming that it is possible, but 

 after years of study and search are not able to point to a single authentic 

 case of a person having contracted tuberculosis through the beef or pro- 

 ducts of the cow. 



Another set of scientists claim that there is a difference in the bacilli 

 of human and bovine tuberculosis and that the germ of one cannot exist 

 in the other. 



A fact that strongly corroborates the^ latter is that during the past 

 fifty years while the use of beef and dairy products has greatly increased, 

 tuberculosis in the human family has decreased 40 per cent. And peo- 

 ple who use most of the products and are most in contact with cattle 

 have least of the disease. 



There is still another set of scientific theorists who claim that the 

 germ is the product and not the cause of the disease. 



The live stock board by a series of experiments with milk from tuber- 

 culous cows on guinea pigs, by innoculation, have tried to demonstrate 

 the theory of transmissibility. This is manifestly unfair. The guinea 

 pig is a verydelecate, short-lived little creature, valuable perhaps for cer- 

 tain lines of experiments, but not for one involving the question of tuber- 

 culosis, because of its susceptibility to the disease. In fact, tuberculosis 

 is its greatest enemy, and then there is no way of knowing whether or not 

 the conditions shown upon the postmortem examination existed before 

 the inoculation was made. 



