ACTINOMYCOSIS. 
13 
all other diseases put together, not including injuries, has not 
been, I believe, one fifth as much. 
Individual cattle owners, who are of course financially in¬ 
terested, will tell you that the meat is healthy and all right, 
because after an animal is killed and dressed the meat shows 
no evidence of the disease. If all meat inspection was carried 
out on this plan, and if the general public had to depend on 
the purity and healthfulness of their meat supply from such a 
mode of inspection, what would be the result? People would 
be eating the germs and spores of disease every day, for it is 
a fact that an animal may be suffering from various different 
forms of disease, more especially if the disease is not of an 
acute nature, and if properly bled and all the internal organs 
and offal removed, leaving nothing but the bare carcass to 
judge by, the meat in its general appearance to the naked eye 
may present no symptom of unhealthiness, while under the 
magnifying powers of the microscope it may prove to be 
swarming with the germs of disease. Hence such an examina¬ 
tion does not prove, as they would like to have you believe it 
does, that the flesh of an animal suffering from the disease is 
sound and healthy, and fit for human consumption. 
If Actinomycosis were a local disease, and confined alto¬ 
gether to the bony structures of the head, there might be 
some truth in such a line of argument, but post mortem ex¬ 
aminations conducted in a fair and impartial manner on ani¬ 
mals that showed very little evidence of the disease locally, 
and presenting in other respects a general appearance of 
health, revealed the fact that the germs of the disease were 
present in one or more of the internal organs, and this fact in 
itself should be sufficient evidence to prove conclusively to 
any fair and impartial mind that it is not a local but a general 
disease. As to the manner in which these germs are con¬ 
veyed to the different parts of the animal’s body, it is most 
probably through the medium of the circulations, and hence it 
is unreasonable to suppose that disease germs can be floating in 
the blood without some parts of the muscular tissue as well as 
some of the internal organs becoming contaminated, thus ren¬ 
dering the meat of such animals not only unfit, but unsafe for 
human food. 
