2 BULLETIN 65, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTUBE. 
in the following year the horses of Iowa were said to have ‘‘died like 
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, while in 1902 and again in 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 applied 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 theneck,”’ “head disease,” “mad staggers,’ “‘sleepystaggers,”’ 
etc. Through therecent investigations of Grimm, Schmidt, and others 
it has been quite definitely established 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 Fréhner 
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 slides to discover the inflamma- 
tory changes. As a result the more recent writers have adopted 
the viewpoint that the two terms, Borna disease and cerebrospinal 
meningitis, are synonymous. 
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 poliomyelitis (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, while 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 
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