PREVALENCE OF BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS. 
459 
Walley’s “Four Bovine Scourges” considers contagious 
pleuro-pneumonia, rinderpest, foot and mouth disease and 
tuberculosis as the four great cattle plagues of the world. 
In this country rinderpest is unknown; foot and mouth dis¬ 
ease does not exist at present; contagious pleuro-pneumonia 
has been stamped out in every locality in the United States 
where it has ever existed, so that to-day we can safely say that 
the only one of the four great bovine scourges staring us in the 
face and challenging us to combat, if we are not afraid to grap¬ 
ple with it, is tuberculosis. 
During the past four or five years many of the states, partic¬ 
ularly in the East, have been aroused to take steps to eradicate 
tuberculosis from among their neat stock, chiefly by having the 
work attended to by cattle commissioners, and while numbers 
of cattle have been examined, yet as a rule the work has not 
been done in a way to give any idea of what relation the num¬ 
ber of diseased cattle bear to the number of healthy ones, or 
what the ratio of herds where the malady exists is to the herds 
where the creatures are all healthy. 
During the winter of 1892-93 the New York State Board of 
Health, having been empowered to regulate the matter of bo¬ 
vine tuberculosis in that state, undertook a farm to farm inspec¬ 
tion of the cattle in two dairy districts with a view of ascertaining 
about the per cent, of tuberculous cows in a certain region. In 
lower Westchester County approximately 10,000 herd were 
examined, and in the neighborhood of 80 were destroyed as 
tuberculous, or 8 per cent. In Orange County, in the neighbor¬ 
hood of Monroe, about 10,000 herd of cattle were examined, 
and 35 were killed as tuberculous, or 35 per cent. 
In testing herds with tuberculin, I have found that by means 
of the old-fashioned physical examination, about one case out 
of three present could be picked out, that is after diagnosing 
the cases present in a herd by means of a physical examination, 
and then testing it with tuberculin, three animals will react to 
everyone found by means of an ordinary diagnosis. Taking 
this for granted, it is safe to say that among the herds of the 
