648 
NEW YORK STATE VETERINARY COLLEGE. 
hut if the mere economic advantage would demand such a step, how much more 
would the protection of human health and life ! How much of the physical disease and 
death of man is due to direct transmission from corresponding diseases in our domestic 
animals, is only now beginning to be realized. 
Among parasites some of the most deadly of man’s tormentors come directly from our 
live stock. Irichina, echinococcus, the beef and pork tapeworms, strongylus gigas, and 
actinomycosis may be mentioned in this connection. 
Among microbian diseases the list is no less redoubtable. Glanders, farcy, rabies, 
tetanus, milk sickness, tuberculosis, anthrax, malignant oedema, septicaemia, erysipelas, 
gangrene and infectious ostitis may be adduced as examples. 
i he more intimately we acquaint ourselves with the subject of communicable or con¬ 
tagious disease the more deeply are we impressed with the fact that there is the closest 
relationship and interdependence between these affections as they appear in man and ani¬ 
mals. Indeed, in many cases, as in the echinococcus, the beef and pork tapeworms, and 
even the trichina, the successive appearance of man and animal as the host of the parasite, 
at the different stages of its development, is a condition of its propagation. So far as we 
know it is impossible for the echinococcus or the beef taenia to live in the same host, or 
in a host of the same genus in both its larva and mature condition. Man harbors the 
larva and the dog the taenia, or the calf entertains the larva and his master the taenia. 
In the case of contagious affections due to microbes, the same alternation from man to 
beast and from beast to man, is not so essential to their maintenance, and yet the intimacy 
of the relation between the domesticated animal and the civilized man is so close that many 
such diseases are largely propagated in this way. In this sense, glanders and anthrax 
stand out as largely industrial diseases. The first appears in persons having close rela¬ 
tions to horses and horse products—grooms, coachmen, stablemen, cowboys, soldiers, 
farmers, horse-dealers, knackers, veterinarians, surgeons, tanners, gardners,—whose daily 
avocations lay them especially open to direct infection. The second is a disease of farm¬ 
ers, cattlemen, shepherds, butchers, tanners, hair and wool workers. 
But neither disease is by any means restricted to these classes. These suffer more 
numerously, but others suffer in a limited degree, through direct channels of contagion. 
And the danger of such irregular transmission is in exact ratio with the number of diseased 
animals that are allowed to survive in a district. A single glandered animal is a source 
of no great danger. He may be even used on public highways, but his contact wither 
proximity to man is necessarily somewhat restricted and the human risk is correspondingly 
small. But let him have free scope to infect others, and these to infect others in turn, 
until one can hardly enter a street without meeting an infected animal and having him 
snort his deadly nasal discharge on one’s person and into one’s nose, eyes and lips, and 
the danger at once becomes imminent. Let glanders be neglected in a streetcar stable 
until its victims are counted by the score, or on a horse-ranch until the diseased mount up 
into the hundreds, and the dangers first to the caretakers, and second to the general public, 
is greatly enhanced, and human victims of this most loathsome and deadly disease become 
comparatively common. Let a grocer, baker, milkman, or other vendor of human food, 
keep a glandered horse and use it in his delivery wagon, and the hands of the driver, 
alternately coming in contact with the viiulent discharges and the articles of food, 
threaten to become a very direct cause of infection to his unsuspecting customers. 
A single anthrax animal would also be primarily a source of apparently little danger, 
but when that diseased subject is allowed to contaminate other animals and even sus¬ 
ceptible soil, which can retain and propagate the bacillus, the danger to both man and 
beast is enormously increased. Brought up from the graves, by the rising of the soil water 
in wet seasons, or by the intervention of the earthworm or the burrowing rodent, then 
cltied up and blown by the winds upon the vegetation ; drawn up from wells in the drink- 
ing water; borne along by streams and rivers to new localities ; carried on the feet and 
even in the stomachs of vermin, birds and insects, and implanted in the skin by their 
mandibles and biting apparatus, the bacillus finds many channels of conveyance and 
numerous modes of infection. Delivered from the butcher’s stall into our kitchens, the 
meat of an anthrax animal is liable to contaminate other food, through knives, forks, 
plates and other articles, and even to cause direct infection through the resistance of the 
spore to the heat of cooking. 
Of late years the general public has been more exercised over tuberculosis than any 
