Synonyms. Definition. Historic notes. Resemblance to black quarter. Bacteriology; saprophytic cocco-bacillus, nonmotile, ærobic, related to microbe of swine plague, chicken cholera, and rabbit septicæmia. Pathogenic to deer, buffalo, cattle, horses, swine, rabbits, rats, mice, goats, and sheep. Variability. Vitality: great in soil, dies in 6 to 20 days when dried, and quickly in antiseptics, resistant to heat. Accessory causes: rise of soil water in winter or in spring, drying of marshes in summer, wet, rich, swampy, mucky soils; youth, gregariousness, carnivorous habit, insects, vermin, wild animals and birds, epizoa, entozoa, wire fences, wounds of all kinds, hard, woody provender; inoculations in wounds the most fatal. Symptoms: superficial with hyperthermia, functional disorder; muscular tremors; violet mucosæ; segregation; swelling in intermaxillary space, tongue, throat, neck, dewlap, or elsewhere, not pitting on pressure. Petechiæ. Death in six hours to four days; thoracic form kills in four to eight days; abdominal form with colics, and bloody often frothy fœtid fæces. Chronic forms usually pulmonary. Lesions: straw-colored exudations subcutem or intramuscular; blood extravasations; in lungs resembles lung plague; on bowels blood effusions, and exudates; softened, blood-stained lymph glands. Spleen usually normal in size. Blood black. Petechiæ extensive. Chronic lesions. Bacillus in exudate, blood and bronchial mucus. Diagnosis: from anthrax, black quarter, lung plague, rinderpest, and malignant œdema. Mortality 50 to 80 per cent. Prevention: isolate and kill affected; destroy or disinfect carcasses and infected things and places, feeding and drinking troughs and manure. Close and drain infected fields. Immunization, by three inoculations with cultures made at a high temperature (86° to 90°) in free air; or with virus that has been grown in pigeon. In case of deer, drive a few days into a noninfecting enclosure, and then on to a sound range. Treatment.
Synonyms. Wild—und Rinderseuche (Bollinger), Buffalo Disease, Barbone (Oreste and Armanni), Cornstalk Disease (Billings, Moore), Sporadic Pneumonia (Smith), Pneumo-enteritis (Galtier.)
Definition. An acute bacteridian disease of domestic and wild herbivora and swine, characterized by sudden onset, rapid and fatal course, marked hyperthermia, accelerated breathing and pulse, and extensive gelatinoid or sanguineous extravasation in the intermaxillary space, tongue, skin, subcutaneous or intermuscular connective tissue, lungs, pleura, pericardium or intestine.
Historic Notes. It is almost certain that in earlier times this affection was often mistaken for gloss-anthrax, blackquarter, or even lung plague. Metaxa, in 1816 in Italy, manifestly describes it. Oreste and Armanni, in 1882 and 1887, traced Italian cases to the microbe. In 1854 it destroyed many cattle and deer in England (Veterinarian). In 1878 Bollinger records its great fatality among the deer, wild boars, cattle and horses in and near the royal parks at Munich, and for a number of years after in Bavaria. Friedberger records its presence in Schlüchtern, Prussia, in 1885–6, Condamine in Cochin China in 1868, and Guillbeau and Hess in Switzerland in 1894. In America, what appears to be the same affection is noted as corn-fodder disease in Nebraska (Billings), as Wildseuche in Tennessee (Norgaard), and as hæmorrhagica septicæmia in Minnesota (Reynolds). I have repeatedly met with the affection in New York in cows arriving from the west, and in the indigenous cattle on wet, mucky, undrained land in spring, about the period of the melting snows.
Bacteriology. The essential cause of the disease is a saprophytic cocco-bacillus, ovoid, with rounded ends, about 1μ long by 0.3 to 0.6μ broad, but showing involution forms and a variable size. It is nonmotile (Kitt claims motility), ærobic (facultative anærobic), takes a polar stain with clear centre in aniline colors, bleaches in Gram’s (1) solution, shows neither spores nor flagella, grows readily in bouillon, on gelatine, (a bluish transparent layer without liquefying), serum at 98° F., milk (without acidifying or coagulating), and alkaline potato (not on the acid). The cultures have a peculiar odor and yield no indol.
The microbe shows a very close relationship with those of swine plague, chicken cholera and rabbit septicæmia, but it sometimes differs in showing little or no pathogenesis for the Guinea-pig.
Animals susceptible. It is pathogenic to deer, buffalo, cattle, horses, swine, rabbits, rats, mice, and to a lesser extent to goats and sheep.
The pathogenesis varies with the immediate source of the microbe. When obtained from cattle a drop of blood kills rabbits in twelve to twenty hours, with intense hæmorrhagic laryngitis and tracheitis. Guinea pigs die in forty to eighty hours. When obtained from the buffalo it killed horse, ox, or pig in twenty to forty-eight hours. That obtained from barbone (buffalo) appears to be more potent than that from septicæmia hæmorrhagica (cattle).
Vitality of the microbe. Simple drying destroys virulence in six to twenty-two days. Virulence is retained for nine days in putrid flesh. It is preserved, and the microbe multiplies in soil or water containing organic matter and nitrates. It is easily destroyed by ordinary antiseptics 1:5000 of mercuric chloride destroying its vitality in one minute (Hueppe). On the contrary it shows a great resistance to changes of temperature. It grows in the soil at 55° to 60° F. (Hueppe), and in old cultures may resist for an hour a temperature of 175° to 195° (Oreste and Armanni).
Accessory Causes. These are such conditions as favor transmission of, or receptivity to the microbe. In Southern France the disease is most common in the winter months, probably because the soil water rises then; on the Roman marshes on the other hand, it prevails especially from May to October, when the water is lowest and most impure. In New York I have seen it especially at the breaking up of the winter frosts, when the water, pent up in the rich organic soils, is suddenly released. It is pre-eminently the disease of wet soils, rich in the debris of decomposing organic matter, of the rich prairies and bottom lands of the Mississippi Valley, of springy, swampy or mucky soils elsewhere, of the Pontine marshes at Rome, of the Delta of the Nile, of the rich virgin soils in Asia. Youth has the greatest receptivity, the older animals having probably acquired immunity through an earlier attack. The animals that live in herds infect each other by contact, fighting, licking, etc., others are affected by eating the vegetation or drinking the water soiled by the diseased, wild boars by eating the carcasses, and all animals by the attacks of biting or blood-sucking insects which have just come from the diseased. It is claimed that the infection is carried by men and animals, and by the sale in villages of the flesh of infected animals. Dogs, wolves, foxes, and other carnivorous animals and birds will also carry the infection for long distances. Finally, it will travel to a greater or lesser distance with running water.