Mörck records the case of a herd of 16 cows, the majority of which aborted in the same year. All the aborting cows were sold and fresh ones purchased. Next year the new stock aborted together with some of the cows that had been held over. He continued this course for eight years without any improvement, and then decided to keep the aborting cows as well as the others. In two years the affection disappeared from the herd.
Such small herds, in which all become early infected, and in which there is no further opportunity for the infection of susceptible animals (cows not yet infected, heifers in first gestation, new purchases), furnish a better opportunity than do large herds, to trace the acquirement of tolerance.
In a question of this kind, one must allow for variations in the different types of abortion caused by various microbes, but in the forms with which we are familiar in Europe and America, the acquired tolerance of the individual can be counted on with great confidence. It has indeed been largely traded upon by purveyors of antiabortion nostrums who promise to cure the individual cow, to which alone their drugs are administered. Two evils result: the stock owner’s money is paid for that which unaided, nature would have accomplished for him; and attention is withdrawn from the real necessity of the case, the prevention of the infection of freshly introduced animals. The nostrum vender thus secures for himself a growing market, as the yearly production of fresh cases in the same herds, appears to demand a constant use of the agent which appeared to work so well in the earlier ones.
Immunized animal still infecting. The cow that no longer aborts is not, therefore, a safe member of a herd. As an individual animal she has become resistant to the pathogenic influence of the germ, she is invulnerable to it to the extent that she no longer aborts, but her system and generative passages have acquired no such active bactericidal power over the microbe as to lead to its speedy destruction. The genital passages, once colonized, continue to be a field of growth of the bacillus long after its power to cause abortion in that particular animal has passed. Analogous cases can easily be quoted from the field of pathology. The horse that has apparently recovered from dourine still conveys the disease to others with which it has sexual congress; the recovered syphilitic person is by no means eligible for marriage; the recovered pig continues to carry the infecting swine plague bacillus in its air passages. In short, it is the rule that the immunized animal can with safety to itself carry a germ that readily infects its nonimmunized fellows.
In the case of infectious abortion this is one of the most dangerous elements, as the apparently healthy recovered cow receives no attention in the way of separation and disinfection, but is allowed to spread the infection through the bull that serves her in common with other cows and by being sold into new and healthy herds.
Symptoms. Contagious abortion sometimes takes the form of temporary sterility, the animal taking the male at frequent intervals, but failing to conceive. If conception takes place, the abortion is usually deferred until the fœtus has attained a considerable development—in cows till the third or seventh month; in mares till the fourth or ninth month; in ewes or sows till the tenth week.
Often times premonitory symptoms are entirely unobserved. Usually there may be detected some heat and enlargement of the mammæ, with a decrease in the milk yield, or a serous modification of the milk as in colostrum. Still more striking is a muco-purulent discharge from the vulva—opaque, white or yellow—in marked contrast with the perfectly clear, transparent mucus which appears in œstrum. The discharge may be densely white (in mares) or reddish, and may be accompanied by some swelling of the vulva and redness of its mucosa, which is dull, rough and granular, or even the seat of a papillary eruption. There is rarely hyperthermia or other constitutional disturbance, and in some cases the abortion is only discovered by the finding of the fœtus and its membranes in the gutter or pasture. The membranes are, however, not unfrequently retained, becoming offensively putrid. In other cases a muco-purulent discharge persists for a length of time, insuring sterility so long as it lasts, and causing ill health and emaciation. The fœtus is usually born dead.
The lesions are confined to the generative organs. Bang, found an odorless, dirty yellow, flocculent, slimy and more or less watery exudate between the chorion and uterine mucosa involving the connective tissue between the chorion and arachnoid so as to render it thick and friable. These conditions were well marked in the French and English cases, and perhaps somewhat less so in the American, which are habitually slower in reaching the abortion. Bang found the uterine catarrh with the characteristic bacillus in cases in which the calf had been carried to full term, exemplifying the local presence and culture of the bacillus without the usual abortion outcome. The bacilli were occasionally, though not always, found in the body of the fœtus, and in some cases the dead and mummified fœtus was found in the womb, which had not been stimulated to its expulsion. He even found the bacillus in the mummified fœtus, and still virulent, after an apparent seclusion of seven months.
ABORTION IN MARES.
This follows the same general course as does the disease in cows. In certain American outbreaks (Kilborne and Th. Smith) it has been traced to a bacillus like the colon bacillus, propagated in the womb and genital passages, and which produced suppurating vaginal catarrh in cows and mares on which it was inoculated. It is liable to occur, without premonitory symptoms having been observed, and to be followed by no marked sequelæ, so that, as in most cases in the cow, it may be looked on as a purely local infection. In England, Penberthy, found it to occur not earlier than the fourth month of gestation, yet he adduces several cases in which the first case in a breeding stud occurred in four weeks after the introduction of an infected mare from an aborting stud. In America on large breeding farms the introduction of the infection has proved ruinous, as many as 70 or 80 per cent. of the mares having aborted in the same season.