Treatment. No antiseptic treatment appears capable of checking the course of the disease.
Surgical treatment alone is of any value, and consists in ablation of the udder, followed by antiseptic dressing. Only a portion of the gland is removed: an elliptical incision is made, including the diseased teat, the skin is then dissected free so as to form a flap; the diseased tissue is isolated; last of all, the vessels are ligatured. The consequences of operation are less grave than might be expected, considering the size of the wound, which heals with fair rapidity.
Moussu has frequently practised this radical method of treatment without losing a single case. The remaining portion of the udder becomes hypertrophied, and is often quite capable of secreting sufficient milk for the nourishment of one lamb.
GANGRENOUS MAMMITIS IN GOATS.
Goats suffer from a form of mammitis which presents symptoms precisely similar as regards development and termination to that of ewes. The disease occurs in a sporadic form in animals giving milk, whatever their breed or the conditions under which they are kept. It has been seen at Alfort, as well as at Lyons.
Moussu has seen it in an enzootic form in herds of milch goats near Bizerta (Tunis), and considers that contagion results from kids sucking healthy animals after having been suckled by diseased ones. Fifty milch goats out of a total of three hundred were affected at the time of Moussu’s visit, and two had already succumbed.
The diagnosis presents no difficulty.
The prognosis is very grave.
The treatment is precisely similar to that of gangrenous mammitis of milch ewes, viz., ablation of the diseased udder.
Of the above-mentioned herd, twenty animals were operated on, and all recovered without accident. Among the others treated by less radical methods, such as scarifications, incisions, antiseptic injections, etc., eight died. The only justifiable treatment, therefore, is ablation.