The advantages of using sterilized toxins are numerous:—
1st. As the material can be derived from a case of the outbreak in hand, there is no risk of using the anthrax protective inoculation for black quarter, hæmorrhagic septicæmia or other disease which is so often confounded with it.
2d. There is no danger of the sudden enhancing of the potency of a weakened microbe on account of some condition of the animal inoculated, as no living microbe is employed.
3d. There is no possibility of planting the anthrax bacillus, on new soil, as is so liable to take place in using the weakened microbe.
4th. There is no necessity for the care and cost of holding the inoculated animals apart by themselves, under official veterinary control for 15 days, of withholding their products from market, or of disinfecting the place where they have been kept. On the contrary the animals inoculated can be treated in every way as if no such injection had been made.
Thorough Drainage and Æration of Land. The most thorough and permanent method of eradicating anthrax is by thorough æration of the soil. In dry, sandy, or gravelly soils, having a good natural or artificial drainage, and not underlaid by an impermeable damp stratum, the bacillus is never permanently found, and, if introduced, is slowly robbed of its virulence by the action of the oxygen. When a soil can be well and permanently ærated by thorough underdrainage, a few years suffice to rob it of its infecting property and render it salubrious. In many localities, however, this is actually or economically impossible, so that the owner is thrown back on the alternatives, of abandoning the soil for stock, or of immunizing all the animals placed on it.
Prevention of Importation of Anthrax. To prevent the introduction of anthrax into a country or district, the usual control must be exerted on trade in cattle and their products, as in the case of other infectious diseases. The exclusion of livestock from an anthrax-infected country or district, or the admission after 6 to 10 days of quarantine and the disinfection of the surface of the animal. Dried hides, horns, hoofs, hair, wool and bristles are even more dangerous, as they are liable to hold the microbe in the spore form which will survive indefinitely and plant the disease widely. The recent great extension of the disease along the Delaware River, in connection with the morocco factories, which draw their hides from the most virulently anthrax regions (India, China, Russia, Africa, S. America) is a strong case in point, and nearly every tannery planted on a favorable soil is an example on a smaller scale. Disinfection of all such products on arrival is essential. But this should be thorough, and no question of trouble nor expense should stand in the way. If the trade cannot stand the expense, it has no right to exist where it is, at the expense of threatened ruin, local and ultimately general, of agriculture, on which all other industries are based. Similar control is demanded of live stock products from infected regions in America.
The control of home markets, stockyards, and abattoirs is no less important. Fortunately the disease is shortlived and deadly, and is much more easily discovered and arrested than in the case of plagues with prolonged incubation and frequently occult form (glanders, tuberculosis). An inspection of the various markets, and the detention of herds that have shown anthrax infection would do much to limit extension. This would entail the disinfection of the infected places, cars, boats, harness, clothing, and other things, and of the skins of the healthy animals of the infected herd.
The Therapeutic Treatment of anthrax in animals must in the main follow in the same lines given below for the human being; locally, antiseptics (mercuric chloride or iodide, Luzol’s solution, hydrochloric acid, phenic acid, iodized phenol, creoline, cresyl, oil of turpentine, formalin, salicylic acid, scarification, excision of the primary sore or swelling with antisepsis, antiseptic injections into the swelling.) Internally, there have been employed, dilute phenic acid, creolin, terebene, calomel, quinine, hydrochloric acid, bichromate of potash, tincture of iron chloride, etc. (see below).