Immunization. A horse that has recovered from the sickness has been long held to be immune and will bring from six to ten times its former price. As any disease is liable to be called the sickness this enhanced value is too often insubstantial. Wiltshire even says that all “salted” horses eventually die of horse sickness if allowed to live long enough. Be this as it may Edington appears to have established a reasonable measure of immunity by his protective inoculations. He takes a recovered (‘salted’) animal and reinoculates it at intervals with encreased doses of virulent blood. After the last of these inoculations the subject is allowed to rest for a long period of time, and is then re-inoculated with a small dose of virulent blood. A definite amount of this horse’s virulent blood is mixed with 50cc. of serum and injected subcutaneously; some days later 30cc. of the same serum with the same dose of blood is injected; at a later date the procedure is repeated, with a reduced dose of serum, and fourteen days later pure virulent blood is injected.” The result has been perfectly satisfactory.
DOURINE.
Synonyms. Definition: Contagious disease of breeding solipeds, with special lesions in generative and nervous system, and skin, and caused by a trypanosoma. Susceptible animals: horse, dog, rabbit, rat, mouse, ass. History: in Europe and America. Causes: contagion; coition; microbiology; trypanosoma equiperdum; its successive stages: 1. granules and refrangent spherules; 2; chromatin bodies with two prolongations; 3. fusiform body with nucleus and nucleolus and two flagella; 4. pyriform bodies with flagella; 5. fusiform body with nucleus, nucleolus and undulating membrane: in blood, sperm, milk, vaginal mucus, sores; disappears from blood in intermissions and rapidly after death. Lesions: phlegmons of generative organs, papules, vesicles, mottling, swollen inguinal glands, penis, testicles, caseation or atrophy, thickened lymphatics, nervous lesions, friable bones, arthritis, liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs, lack of red globules, anæmia, muscular atrophy; in mare, in dog. Symptoms: Horse: incubation 11 days, variable; preputial, scrotal, sub-abdominal swelling, catarrh of genital mucosa, vesicles, sores, swollen penis, semierections; paraphymosis, slight fever, tender loins, frequent micturition, paresis, swollen joints, tendons, emaciation marked anæmia, apathy, dementia, nasal ulcers, submaxillary swellings. Mare: vulvar swelling, distortion, leucorrhœa, eruption, spots of depigmentation, erection of clitoris, urine in driblets often, inguinal swellings, sterility or abortion, lameness, trembling, great anæmia and emaciation. Diagnosis: from urticaria: from glanders, generative lesions, no response to mallein, paresis: from chronic paraplegia, by its coition cause, and in horses only; from vesicular exanthema by gravity and nervous phenomena. Prognosis: Mortality 70 per cent. and upwards. Symptoms in ass slight: in dog severe and fatal; in rabbits severe. Treatment: prevent copulation, castration, local antiseptics early. Prevention: prevent copulation of infected and suspected animals, castrate, import only on certificate and on long quarantine.
Synonyms. Venereal Disease of Solipeds; Equine Syphilis; Maladie du Coit; Chancrous Epizoötic; Breeding Paralysis; Epizoötic Paraplegia.
Definition. A contagious affection of solipeds, transmitted by copulation, and attended by specific lesions in the generative organs and nervous system, such as local venereal swellings, chancrous ulcers and cicatrices, dementia and paralysis.
Susceptibility. As occurring casually the disease is essentially an equine one, yet the following species are susceptible to experimental inoculation in the order named: dogs, rabbits, rats, mice, asses. While the horse shows the greatest susceptibility, the ass is comparatively very resistant to the poison.
History. The malady has probably long prevailed in the east, yet it was first clearly distinguished in 1796 when described by Ammon as prevailing in the royal stud at Trakehnen in Northern Prussia. We have later descriptions of the disease in the same locality in 1801 (Hertwig), and 1807 (Ammon). It was found in Bromberg in 1817 to 1820 (Waltersdorf), also in Hanover (Haveman), in Austria and Bohemia in 1821–8 (Fischer), in Styria in 1821, in Switzerland in 1830, in France in 1830–2 (Lautour), in Silesia and Pomerania in 1833–40 (Fischer), in Italy in 1836, in Russia in 1843, (Fischer), in Silesia and Poland in 1830–40 (Freidberger and Fröhner), in Algiers in 1847–55, and in Syria and Asia generally and perennially (Daumas and Signol).
It appeared at Bloomington, Ill., in 1882, the first affected animal being a brown stallion that had been imported from France and which bore on his neck a brand like the letter D. In this locality it extended to a considerable number of breeding mares and stallions, and having been recognized by Dr. W. L. Williams, was largely stamped out by a rigid quarantine of diseased and exposed animals. Some exposed animals had, however, left the district, and isolated centres of infection have been since found in Nebraska and elsewhere in the United States.
It is not known to have invaded Belgium, Scandinavia, England, South America nor Australasia.
All indications point to Asia or North Africa as the primal home of the disease, as they still prove its perennial one.