Fig. 116.—Caudal extremity of male Strongylus contortus. (Block kindly lent by Prof. McFadyean.)
The treatment is similar to that of gastro-enteritis in cattle, but chief attention should be directed to prophylaxis.
A verminous disease, closely simulating the above, and affecting cattle, sheep, and goats in Texas, is described by Ch. Wardell Stiles in the Annual Report of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1900, p. 356. The disease was of mixed character, and consisted in various degrees of verminous gastritis, verminous enteritis, and verminous bronchitis. In the stomach were found the common twisted wireworm (Strongylus contortus) and Ostertag’s encysted wireworm (Strongylus Ostertagi). It appeared to be present in every calf, steer and cow examined (post-mortem), and was undoubtedly the chief agent in causing death. The sheep and goats were very similarly affected. In the bowel of cattle were found the hookworm (Uncinaria radiata), nodular disease worm (Œsophagostoma columbianum): in that of sheep the hookworm (Uncinaria cernua) and nodular disease worm (Œsophagostoma columbianum), and the fringed tapeworm (Thysanosoma actinioides). In the lungs of the cattle Strongylus micrurus (the small-tailed lungworm), and of sheep the threadworm strongyle (Strongylus filaria) were detected.
Treatment. Sulphate of copper, gasoline and coal-tar creosote were tried, but the best results were obtained from doses of 30 grains (for a lamb) up to 100 grains (for a two-year-old sheep) of thymol in 1 per cent. coal-tar creosote solution.
INTESTINAL COCCIDIOSIS OF CALVES AND LAMBS (PSOROSPERMOSIS, HÆMORRHAGIC ENTERITIS, BLOODY FLUX, DYSENTERY, ETC.).
History. This disease is very common in the Avalon and surrounding districts, sometimes assumes the characteristics of a true epizootic, and affects young bovine animals between the ages of six months and two years, but is commonest and most contagious in animals of from ten to eighteen months old.
It attacks animals in good or bad condition, without distinction of breed or species. It begins towards the end of July, attains its maximum development towards the end of August and September, and disappears in October, though occasionally it continues until November. In exceptional cases Degoix has seen it during January and February in animals which had returned from the fields to the byres about the end of November. It develops earlier than verminous bronchitis, in conjunction with which, however, it often occurs. It is commonest in warm, moist, rainy years, and amongst animals pastured on swampy ground containing numerous springs and streams. Year after year it attacks animals occupying particular pastures in summer. The soil of these pastures is undoubtedly infested with the germs of the disease, just as in places the soil is infested with anthrax bacilli. The appearance of symptoms is preceded by an incubation period of one or two months. The length of this incubation period is fixed by the observations which Degoix has made during the past twenty years, and depends on the time which elapses between the animals being turned into infected pastures and the appearance of the preliminary symptoms.
Symptoms. The disease commences with liquid, serous, fœtid, greenish-black diarrhœa, the material being voided without special straining and the animals losing neither their spirits nor appetite. Fever can scarcely be detected, the temperature ranging between 38° and 39° C. On the second or third day the diarrhœa changes in character. Though it always remains fœtid, it now becomes mucous, reddish-black, or sanguinolent, and contains more or less frequent blood clots of varying size.