BRONCHITIS IN THE OX.
Working oxen most susceptible. Causes, damp buildings, wet, cold, exposed localities. Debility, overwork, poor feeding, close, foul stables, sudden changes of temperature. Previous attacks. Symptoms, mild form, and severe, fever, sneezing, cough, dry, later soft, prostration, retraction of nostrils, labored breathing, hot breath, discharge, watery, milky, purulent. Duration, Complications and sequelæ. Chronic form. Respiratory disturbance, paroxysmal cough, purulent discharge, mucous and sibilant râles, emaciation. Lesions. Treatment, laxative safer, expectorant, derivative stimulant, etc., as in horse. Bronchitis in pigs and sheep.
This is less common than the same disease in the horse, though in working oxen, in which many of the same causes operate, it is frequently seen. It is not infrequent in other cattle in damp buildings or in wet cold exposed situations. Debility from overwork and poor feeding, often brings on the chronic form of this disease. Living out in damp nights after a hard day’s work is another frequent cause. The enervating influence of the hot foul air of many cow houses conduces to it and is specially injurious if alternated with a chilling atmosphere out of doors. Previous attacks strongly predispose to future ones.
Symptoms. Some cases are so slight as to escape a cursory observation and subsiding in a few days leave the animal perfectly well. Others are severe and may prove dangerous.
The earlier symptoms are dullness, staring coat or shivering, and sneezing, followed by reaction with hot clammy mouth, general increase of temperature, rapid pulse, reddened nose and eyes, and suspended rumination. The more characteristic symptoms are a hard, dry, hacking cough, not so resonant as in the horse, and soon a mucous discharge from the nose usually cleared away by the tongue almost as rapidly as formed.
If the case increases in severity, and in many cases almost from the first there is great depression, hanging head, semi-closed watery eyes, extreme movement of the nostrils, hot expired air, labored action of the flank, complete loss of appetite, constipation, fæces covered by mucus, cough very hard, painful, occurring in paroxysms and easily excited by touching the larynx or trachea. This is followed by a loose cough, a free discharge from the nose and a mucous râle on auscultation. Percussion gives healthy resonance. The disease reaches its height on the fifth day and recovery may be almost perfect on the eighth. Its chief danger is from a complication with pneumonia or pleurisy, or from its merging into the chronic form.
Chronic bronchitis in the ox is characterized by a persistent disturbance of the respiration, paroxysms of coughing, a white flocculent discharge from the nose, increasing emaciation, pallor of the mucous membranes, a mucous râle over the windpipe and median part of the chest and a cooing sound over other points. If left to itself emaciation becomes extreme, the skin is harsh, inelastic, attached to the ribs and covered by vermin, and death usually ensues from diarrhœa or consumption.
After death the lesions are like those seen in the horse, unless there is the complication of tuberculous or other disease of the substance of the lungs.
Treatment. Neither the general care nor the remedial treatment differs materially from that for the horse. The principle difference is in the lesser liability to superpurgation and in the preference to be given to Epsom or glauber salts over aloes as a laxative. Either saline may be given in dose of one pound combined with an ounce of ginger or other stimulants, and followed up by similar diuretics, expectorants and tonics, as in the horse. The chronic form is to be treated as in the horse.
Pigs and sheep affected with bronchitis must be treated on the same general principles as the ox, only giving one-fifth the amount of the different medicaments, and in the case of the pig oleaginous purgatives and emetics as advised for the dog.