Diagnosis. It is easy to diagnose this condition, and quite possible to distinguish it from the diarrhœa of tuberculous enteritis, infectious hepatitis, and other conditions.
Prognosis. The prognosis is very grave, and the disease almost always proves fatal.
Treatment. At the present moment no curative treatment is known. Lignières’ treatment—viz., the injection of physiological salt solution and serum from healthy oxen, and saline solution or defibrinated blood—has never given permanently successful results.
All the drugs usually employed against diarrhœa, the antiseptics, astringents, etc., fail, or confer merely momentary benefit. Economically, nothing is to be gained by keeping the patients alive. With great care existence may be prolonged for months, or even for several years, but the animals never regain condition, and are never of any use.
The most rapid and lasting good effects follow the administration of 2½ to 8 fluid drachms of hydrochloric acid per day, given in two portions and very freely diluted.
DYSENTERY IN CALVES.
This disease sometimes appears on the first day after birth, frequently on the second or third. It may be mistaken for septicæmia of umbilical origin.
Symptoms. The young animal may be born vigorous and in good condition, though this is exceptional. More frequently it is puny and below normal weight. The first evacuation (of meconium) may exhibit the diarrhœic character; in other cases this peculiarity only appears on the second or third day, when half-digested milk is passed. The fluid is greyish, extremely fœtid, and rapidly becomes brownish and blood-stained. Evacuation is frequent and accompanied by tenesmus.
The patients at once become very dull, refuse to suck, and resist efforts to feed them by hand. The temperature rises, and the diarrhœa, which at first was of an alimentary character, becomes mucous, serous and blood-stained. The little patients appear “tucked up,” the flanks sink in, the strength diminishes, and in twenty-four hours, or two or three days at most, they die of exhaustion.
Recovery is exceptional, and when the disease assumes this character it usually attacks a considerable proportion of the other animals in the byre.