Bovine tuberculosis : cause, cure, and eradication a summation of material, facts and eminent opinions for the use of farmers, cattle-owners, milk-producers, veterinarians, students, and others with appendices on the diseases which simulate tuberculosis, actinomycosis and Johne's disease also appendices on calf mortality and the destruction of rats, and a glossary of technical words.

Date:: [1912?]

Credit: Bovine tuberculosis : cause, cure, and eradication a summation of material, facts and eminent opinions for the use of farmers, cattle-owners, milk-producers, veterinarians, students, and others with appendices on the diseases which simulate tuberculosis, actinomycosis and Johne's disease also appendices on calf mortality and the destruction of rats, and a glossary of technical words. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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not to form part of human food, and indeed ought not to be used as food at all. “Our results clearly point to the necessity of measures more stringent than those at present enforced being taken to prevent the sale or the consumption of such milk.” It has been a rather commonly accepted view that little risk was involved by tuberculosis in cows unless the udder was affected. The Royal Commissioners1 do not accept this view, however. They point out that animals affected with pulmonary disease cough up large numbers of virulent bacilli, and they are either scattered about the shippon or swallowed, and so the intestinal canal becomes infected. Apart from this the heces may be a grave source of infection, and they lay more stress upon this than upon pulmonary infection. “ We are thus brought face to face,” says Dawson,2 “ with the fact that when a cow’s lungs are sufficiently involved to cause her to discharge tubercle bacilli she becomes a disseminator of tuberculosis, regardless of the question of her udder being diseased. The fact that there is extreme care, as regards cleanliness, in milking operations about such animals is no guarantee that the milk is free from tubercle bacilli.” The evidence obtained by our Commissioners, as well as by the Imperial German Commission, whose findings agree uniformly with those of the British Commission, seems to point to the view that Koch was correct in believing bovine and human tuberculosis are not identical. This is of little practical importance from our present point of view, seeing that both the diseases are reciprocally communicable and fatal. It is easy to realise the importance of this when one so often sees a cow’s flanks covered with cakes of dry dung an inch or so thick, and with how little compunction a few crumbs of these are shaken into the milk pail during milking, not to mention the danger of other cows in the same shippon being infected. Xewsholme3 says that the “ ....view most generally and justifiably entertained is that human tuberculosis may be and is caused by bacilli of either the bovine or human type.” He also (]notes Ravenel’s views : “ ‘ Theoretically, there is no reason why the bovine bacillus should not be readily transmitted to man. It has, for all other mammalia on which it has been tried, a virulence greatly exceeding that of the human tubercle bacillus. It would certainly seem a remarkable anomaly for man, who is one of the most susceptible of all animals to tuberculosis, to be immune to the most powerful virus known. In the whole range of communicable diseases we have nothing comparable to this state of affairs, should we admit it.’ ” I Second Interim Kept., p. 28. 2. tith I. C. on T., Vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 736. 3. The Prevention of Tuberculosis, p. 130. More stringent measures urged

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