ACUTE CATARRHAL ENTERITIS IN SOLIPEDS.
Definition. Causes: Irritants swallowed, debility, improper, insufficient food, congestions, parasitisms, impaired innervation or circulation, iced water, chills, perspirations, fatigue, hot, damp weather, overfeeding, cryptogams, bacteria, newly harvested fodder, septic, or fermented food, leafy fodder, toxins, stagnant, septic water, lack of pepsin, muriatic acid and bile, diseased teeth or jaws or salivary glands. Lesions: Gastritis, congestion of small intestine and colon, in striæ, thickening, ecchymosis, ulceration, necrosis, excess of mucus with pus, villi, follicles and glands swollen. Symptoms: Fever, high colored urine, costiveness, coated tongue, red eyes, inappetence, sluggishness, emaciation, weakness, unthriftiness, colics, rumbling, diarrhœa; or more fever, suffering, anorexia, icterus, hurried breathing, pleuritic ridge, arched back, tender abdomen, rumbling, flatus, diarrhœa, critical or bloody, anxiety, debility, prostration, collapse. Prognosis. Treatment: In mild cases, careful diet, and laxatives with antiferments, in severe cases, laxatives, anodynes, antiseptics, demulcents, stimulants of peristalsis, enemata, counter-irritants, fomentations, compresses, mustard, in profuse diarrhœa antiseptics, anodynes, demulcents, calomel and chalk, bismuth, astringents, boiled flour or starch, gums. Dieting during convalescence.
Definition. Inflammation of the intestinal mucosa.
Causes. Irritants of all kinds taken in with food, or as medicine or otherwise and acting on the mucosa. Debilitating conditions (chronic disease, starvation, overwork, close indoor life) which lower the tone of the system at large, and local debilitating conditions like coarse, dry, fibrous, innutritious food, congestions, parasitisms, impaired innervation and troubles of the circulation are strongly predisposing. Drinking iced water may operate by lowering the tone of the intestines but seems to habitually act rather by inducing reaction and congestion. Chills of the surface, especially when perspiring and fatigued, act in the same way. The relaxation and atony attending on long continued hot weather, predisposes to enteritis, but is doubtless even more injurious by the abundance of ferments which it propagates in food and water.
Overfeeding and stimulating aliments thrown on an alimentary canal in such an atonic condition become especially hurtful. The injury, however, comes most commonly from food that contains an excess of cryptogams or bacterial ferments or from water similarly charged. Newly harvested fodders in which the microbes are still in a state of vigorous life, when added to the poisonous principles in certain immature seeds (leguminosæ, gramineæ, etc.); fodders that have undergone fermentative changes (rotten potatoes, turnips, musty hay or oats); fodders that are leafy and harbor an excess of microbes (alfalfa, sainfoin, cowpea, clover) are especially dangerous at times. If musty or otherwise altered they often contain besides, dangerous toxins.
In taking into account the fungi and microbes in spoiled foods, we need not give exclusive attention to the particular species of microbe present. An extended observation shows that the same ferments may be present in the dry, well cured, wholesome fodder, and in the musty or spoiled specimen, the main difference being in the excess found in the latter case as compared with the former. With the excess too, there is always present a large amount of toxins, ptomaines and other more or less poisonous products, which, acting on the intestinal mucosa or even on the system at large, tend to reduce its vitality and to lay it open to the attacks of bacteria which had otherwise remained perfectly harmless. Porcher and Desoubry, Achard and Phulpin and Wurz have shown experimentally that intestinal microbes can enter the chyle and blood from even a healthy bowel. The streptococcus of pneumoenteritis equi of Galtier and Violet appears to be a common fodder and intestinal microbe, which has become pathogenic, because of its excess or on account of a lack of resistance on the part of the animal. In the same way the various intestinal cocci and the common colon bacillus may become pathogenic when the normal antagonism of the bowels and their contents is lessened.
In the same way stagnant and septic water may be harmless to one animal of great vigor and good tone and pathogenic to another which lacks these qualities; or the excess of the ferment and its toxins may overcome the natural resistance of the animal. The lack of the natural antiferments of the intestine, pepsin and hydrochloric acid, on the one hand and bile on the other, will also conduce to multiplication of the microbes and their products, so that they can successfully attack the mucous membrane.
Other accessory causes operate more or less, thus any impairment of the process of mastication, through diseased teeth or jaws tends to the escape of undigested food through the stomach, as a specially favorable culture media for the microbes, and irritants of the mucosa.
Lesions. As the disease very often implicates the stomach (gastro-enteritis), the usual lesions of gastritis will be seen. Most commonly the lesions are best marked in the small intestine, and again in other cases in the colon, but usually there is more or less change in all parts of the intestinal canal. The small intestine is almost devoid of aliments and the mucosa deeply congested in patches or striæ, with at points thickening, softening so that it crushes under the finger, hemorrhagic discoloration, and even ulceration, and necrotic changes. It is covered with a layer of mucus, thin and mucilaginous or thick and glutinous, containing many granular and pus cells. The villi are swollen, the follicles of Lieberkuhn puffed up, and the agminated and solitary glands widely dilated, filled with exudate, and surrounded by an area of congestion. Proliferation of small, round cells has produced embryonic tissue in the mucosa and especially between the glands.
Symptoms. In the mildest form there is hyperthermia, thirst, insensible loins, scanty, high colored urine, costive bowels, a few small pellets only being passed at a time, hard, dry and covered with a mucous film, hot, clammy mouth, coated tongue, with redness along the edges and tip, yellowish red eyes, impaired appetite, dull, sluggish habit, a tendency to hang back on the halter, and a steady loss of flesh and increased dryness and unthriftiness of the coat. Slight, intermittent colics occurring especially after meals and attended by loud rumbling of the bowels are marked features. This may be followed by slight relaxation of the bowels and recovery in about a week, unless it should become complicated by intestinal indigestion or impaction, or should merge into the acute form.