One or two in a large herd will have a loud snuffling breathing, which may subside so as to be entirely overlooked in winter, but reappears when put to pasture in the spring and continues in a marked form throughout the warm weather and until after the animal is returned to winter quarters. There appears to be little or no fever nor constitutional disturbance except what comes from the obstructed breathing, and the yield of milk may be unchanged. The symptoms would indicate a purely local disease. Yet so few are attacked out of a herd that it cannot be actively contagious.
On close examination the nasal chambers are found to be narrowed, there is manifest thickening of the mucosa, and its surface feels rough and uneven, with miliary elevations. There is of course more or less glairy discharge. If the examination is made about midsummer, the finger introduced into the nose will usually detect the ends of twigs that have been introduced into the cavity and broken off. When withdrawn these may prove individually from four to eight inches long, and some force may be required to extract them. In winter these are often absent, having been apparently dropped one by one. The absence of these sources of irritation sufficiently accounts for the manifest improvement during the colder months. In spite however of the winter remissions the disease tends to a steady advance year by year. While nothing definite is known of its pathology, the occurrence of this disease in given localities, its manifestly local nature, and its persistence when once established would suggest enquiry as to the possible existence of parasitism, bacteridian or otherwise.
Until further discovery treatment can only be of a general nature. Removal of the foreign bodies from the nose, pasturage where there is no brush to replace them, soiling when clean pastures cannot be found, and the use of astringent and antiseptic agents by insufflation or injection would be indicated.
MALIGNANT CATARRH OF CATTLE.
Local causes. Debilitation. Polluted air. Poor diet. Symptoms, gastro-intestinal, fever, lachrymation, turbid aqueous, photophobia, congestion of mucosæ, generally disturbed circulation, breathing, depression, heat of forehead, buccal petechiæ, epithelial desquamation, abrasions, ulcers, abortion, albuminuria, local swellings, shedding of horns, dropsy, dyspnœa. Lesions, in nasal mucosa, subcutem, cerebral, dark blood. Prognosis. Treatment, antiphlogistic, laxative, diuretic, tonic, locally steam, antiseptic, astringent, trephining.
This disease occurs chiefly in cold damp marshy localities where the vital power is impaired or in cold situations exposed to severe north and east winds. In the wet cold seasons of spring and autumn it is especially prevalent. According to Rychner it rarely attacks old cows but prevails among young cows and oxen. In the south of France on the contrary it appears chiefly in the hot season (June and July) and is attributed to suppressed transpiration. It prevails especially however in herds kept in small filthy stables, low in the roof, hot, close and badly aired. (Festal). In New York it appears in cattle on black muck pastures and in Minnesota on the dried up ponds.
Symptoms. Diarrhœa is a common premonitory symptom arising from the irritation of the intestinal canal as it is soon followed by some degree of costiveness, the dung becoming dark colored, firm and scanty. Diarrhœa reappears later. The coat stares or the beast actually shivers; the head is depressed; the roots of the horns and the forehead are hot; the eyes are sunken, swollen and red, suffused with tears, turbid in their anterior chamber (aqueous humor) and intolerant of light; The muzzle dry and hot; the mouth hot but moist with abundant saliva; the mucous membranes of the mouth, nose and vagina have a bluish red color; the pulse is rapid and more or less full or hard; impulse of the heart weak; the breathing is accelerated, the respiratory sound is heightened in intensity and a cough is frequent. Temperature 104° to 107° F. The urine is scanty and high colored. The surface of the body is alternately hot and cold, and after some time a watery fluid begins to distil from the nose.
At the end of twenty-four hours the symptoms are intensified or altered. The eyelids are more swollen and the flow of tears more profuse; the nasal discharge becomes slimy, and streaked with blood, and accumulations take place in the frontal sinuses as indicated by the increasing heat of the forehead and the dullness on percussion. In the mouth appear dark red spots, from blood extravasation, over which the epithelium sloughs off leaving raw unhealthy sores. The appetite entirely fails; dung and urine are passed painfully and with effort, and abortion frequently takes place in pregnant cows. The urine is albuminous with cell forms, and casts. The limbs appear rigid and it pains the animal to move.
From the fourth to the sixth day the ulceration appears on the mucous membrane of the nose which has often a claret color, and the nasal discharge becomes again more watery and irritating. The muzzle is swollen and a dropsical infiltration appears beneath the jaws which extends along the neck to beneath the thorax and into the limbs. Portions of the nasal mucous membrane now slough off, and similar sloughs are often seen on the skin of different parts of the body; the secreting structures of the horns and hoofs even participating so that these are easily detached or shed. Saliva flows profusely from the lips, a fetid watery diarrhœa succeeds the constipation, the dropsy becomes nearly general and death occurs on the eighth, ninth or tenth day of the illness. Convulsions and symptoms of suffocation may precede death.
In a post mortem section the principal lesions are found in the nasal cavities and skin. The areolar tissue in both is the seat of an abundant serous infiltration, which has taken place into the deeper layers of the skin as well, rendering it thick, hard and unyielding. Besides the sloughs and ulcerations on the skin and mucous membranes, false membranes have been met with, on the lining membrane of the mouth and air passages. The ulcers in the nose have in many cases reached the bone, and from the abundant infiltration and softening, the membrane is easily stripped from the walls of this cavity and of the sinuses. The general infiltration appears to have reached the brain, which is described as softened and having an undue amount of liquid in its cavities. The blood contained in the vessels is dark colored and numerous patches of extravasation are visible on the mucous and serous membranes as well as in the interior of organs.