Treatment. Emesis with ipecacuan and tepid water, followed by abundant mucilaginous or albuminous liquids. Flaxseed tea, gum arabic, and white of eggs are useful. Avoid oils, alcohol and chloroform which dissolve the cantharides.
Among other insects which act as vesicants may be named the cockroach (blatta orientalis) and the potato beetle (cantharis vitatta), also the cantharis cinerea, cantharis marginata, cantharis atrata, and cantharis nuttalli. The larvæ of various lepidoptera, thus army worm, Cnethocampa primivora, Cnethocampa processionea, liparis auriflua, lithosia crinola, and the larvæ of the artica cassus ligniperda, and pieris brassica are covered with stinging hairs charged with formic acid and perhaps an enzyme, which are shed with the skin in passing into the state of chrysalis, and getting mixed with fodders produce violent stomatitis, hemorrhagic gastro-enteritis and nephritis.
POISONING BY FUNGI, BACTERIA AND THEIR PRODUCTS IN FOOD.
Poisons in spoiled food: Moulds, rust, smut, bacteria, toxins. Action of moulds on rabbits, on alimentary and nervous systems. Smuts, ergots and their congeners. Tetanizing and paralyzing products. Duration of symptoms.
Food is usually spoiled by the growth of moulds, rust, smut, bacteria and the toxins which they produce.
Kaufman has experimented with moulds on rabbits. He found that aspergillus glaucus (green mould) grown on bread produces a fatal infection in the rabbit even in very minute doses (⅒ milligramme); that it will attain this in a neutral or even slightly acid medium as well as in an alkaline one; and that the spores retain this pathogenic activity for six months at ordinary temperatures. The aspergillus glaucus, penicillium glaucum, and mucor mucedo affect the intestinal organs only, while ascophora oidium aurantiacum affect the nervous system as well. The smuts (ustilago) and ergots (claviceps purpurea) vary considerably in their potency according to the conditions of their growth and the stage of their development, yet experiment has shown a special action on the vaso-motor nerves leading to nervous disorders, circulatory troubles, and trophic disease. In connection with ustilago maidis (corn smut) there are usually found bacteria, such as bacillus maidis and bacillus mesentericus fuscus, and the combined products of these and the ustilago have been studied by Lombroso, Dupre and Erba. These observers isolated a red oil with the tetanizing action of strychnia, and oleo-resinous substances having bases which they named maïsine and pellagrozeine, and which had a paralytic action on the nerve centres. Pellizi and Tirelli cultivated the bacteria of damaged maize and found that the sterilized cultures, introduced into rabbits hypodermically or intravenously caused muscular jerking, exaggeration of the reflexes, tetanic spasms and paralysis which lasted for fifteen days after the injection. This is exactly in line with the causation of contagious bacteridian diseases in which the ptomaines and toxins are, as a rule, the immediate pathogenic factors.
CRYPTOGAMIC POISONING IN SOLIPEDS.
Prominent symptoms, asthenia and vertigo. Vary with cryptogam, merge into zymotic diseases. Causes: grain harvested damp and moulded, bluish or greenish, hay greenish white, brown or black, clover reddish, musty fodder, and diuresis, indigestion, gastric intestinal and systemic paresis, somnolence, delirium. Rusts, spring and summer, their evolution. Bunt, smut, produce fever and paralysis, spasms, abortions and dry gangrene, buccal erosions; evolution of ergot, honey dew on leguminous plants causing skin disease, bacterial ferments, diplococcus, streptococcus from foul water, causing enteritis. Symptoms: adynamic, dullness, blunted sense, pendent head, ears, eyelids, congested, yellow, ecchymosed conjunctiva, fever, tympany, colic, constipation, dung small, round, coated masses, vertigo, sometimes fatal diarrhœa, or colliquative diuresis; vertiginous: fever, anorexia, yellow mucosæ, tardy breathing, costiveness colics, stupor, somnolence, giddiness, heavy steps, stumbling, delirium, push head against wall, clinch jaws, grind teeth, make walking or trotting or plunging motions, or pull on halter and fall, amaurosis, paralysis, coma. Remissions. Death in one day or upward. Resumption of functions and recovery. Diagnosis: from meningo-encephalitis. Lesions: gastro-intestinal congestion, infiltration, ecchymosis, fermenting ingesta, congestion of mesenteric glands, liver, brain and meninges. Leucin and tyrosin in urine. Treatment: stomach pump, antiferments, potassium iodide, purgatives, enemata; for brain, bleeding, sedatives, ice, snow, elevation, derivatives, prevent mechanical injury.
The most prominent features of cryptogamic poisoning in these animals are asthenia and vertigo. In dealing with such poisoning, however, we must bear in mind that we have in hand, not one particular disease but a group, differing among themselves according to the cryptogam and its products which may be present:—a group moreover which overlaps more or less the true zymotic diseases.
Causes. Oats, barley and other grain or fodder which has been put up damp, and especially ground feed, becomes speedily overgrown and permeated with moulds, especially penicillium glaucus, aspergillus flavus and glaucus, mucor racemosus, and ascophora mucedo which give a bluish or greenish color and heavy odor, rob it of its nutritive constituents and charge it with toxic products. On mouldy hay it is common to find aspergillus candidus, botrytis grisea, torula herbariorum, and eurotium herbarium which form a greenish white or brownish dust. The spœria herbarium is characterized by small black or brown spots with yellowish, brown or black spores. The peronspora trifolium attacks growing clover (clover sickness) and isaria fuciformis the fescue grasses. The latter has a red color and mucous consistency and is charged with producing fatal poisoning in cattle.