PREVENTION.—The first step toward the prevention of glanders in man is the systematic restriction and extinction of the affection in animals. This has been already sufficiently referred to above. Further measures of prophylaxis embrace the following: the avoidance of contact with glandered and suspected horses by all persons having any wounds, abrasions, or ulcers on their skins; the cauterization with nitrate of silver of all such sores on persons necessarily brought in contact with glandered or suspected animals or their products; the general diffusion of information as to the danger from glandered animals; washing of hands and face in a solution of carbolic acid or chloride of lime after handling infected or suspected animals or their carcases or products; the thorough disinfection or destruction (preferably by fire) of harness, clothing, racks, mangers, wagon-poles, buckets, troughs, brushes, combs, litter, and fodder that have been exposed to infection; and, finally, the exclusion from the markets of all meat derived from suspected or infected animals. It is generally held that the flesh of the horse alone demands inspection, but with the known susceptibility of sheep, goats, and rabbits it can easily be conceived how the infection may reach man through his food, though horse-flesh is never consumed. That glanders has never been recognized as arising from the consumption of diseased sheep or rabbits does not prove that it has never reached man by this channel, any more than the absence of all recognition of the infection of man from the horse would prove the non-occurrence of such infection until the beginning of the present century. The knowledge that the animals used for food in this country are liable to contract and convey this disease is an additional reason for the systematic and universal suppression of the disease among the equine population.
ANTHRAX (MALIGNANT PUSTULE).
BY JAMES LAW, F.R.C.V.S.
SYNONYMS.—Latin, Ignis Sacer, Anthrax Epizoöticus, Pustula Maligna, Pustula Pestifera, Erysipelas Carbunculosum, Carbunculo Contagioso, Glossanthrax, Angina Carbunculosa, Anthrax Hæmorrhoidalis, Mycosis Intestinalis, Apoplexia Splenitis, etc. English, Black Erysipelas, Malignant Vesicle, Anthrax Fever, Splenic Apoplexy, Splenic Fever, Inflammatory Fever, Carbuncular Fever, Black Quarter, Blood-Striking, Bloody Murrain, Blain, etc. French, Pustule maligne, Charbon, Fièvre putride, Typhohémie, Pélohémie, Mal de Rate, Splenite Gangréneusé, etc. German, Karbunkelkrankheit, Contagiose Karbunkel, Milzbrand, Milzseuche, Milzbrandfieber, Brandbeulenseuche, Rothlauf, etc. Russian, Jaswa (boil-plague). Italian, Antrace. Spanish, Carbunculo, Lobado. Swedish, Boskapssjukan. Mexican, Calentura del piojo.
DEFINITION.—Anthrax is an acute, infectious, bacteridian disease, occurring mostly in the Herbivora and Omnivora, but communicable to other mammals (including man), to birds, and even fishes. Its local manifestations are exceedingly varied in kind, but the malady is characterized by the presence in the tissues or blood, or both, of specific spherical and linear bacteria (micrococcus and bacillus anthracis), leading to arrest of hæmatosis, to disintegration of the blood-globules, to sanguineous engorgement of the spleen, to capillary embolism, and to a spreading gangrenous inflammation.
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION.—While ancient history is not clear as to the specific diseases of animals, yet there is the strongest presumption that nearly all great plagues that attacked indiscriminately animals and man were of this nature. Thus, the plague of murrain, with boils and blains breaking out on man and beast, in the days of Moses, was probably of this kind (Gen. ix. 3.); also that which at the siege of Troy extended from animals to man, and many later epizoötics in all parts of the world. No infectious disease of man and animals, with the single exception of tuberculosis, has been more widely diffused, and none can be considered as more cosmopolitan. Heusinger, in his classic work on Milzbrandkrankheit, traces the ravages of the disease from the highest to the lowest latitudes in the northern and southern hemispheres and in the Old World and the New. He adduces outbreaks in Siberia, Astrakan, Lapland, and Finland, in Russia, Prussia, Poland, Silesia, Bavaria, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, East and West Indies, North and South America, etc. We can now add all the great English, French, and other European colonies not included in the above (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, etc.), together with China and Japan. We find, moreover, that the disease is always most prevalent where agriculture is in its most primitive condition, so that there can be little doubt of the prevalence of the affection in the less-civilized countries as well. But while the disease is prevalent in all parts of the world, its ravages are largely subordinate to the nature of the soil. Wherever this is close, impervious, marshy, or charged with an excess of organic matters, the gaseous emanations of which drive out most of the oxygen, the anthrax-germs, once introduced, tend to be preserved indefinitely. Thus, in drying up basins with no natural drainage, on lake and river margins, on deltas, in forests, in mucky, mossy, or peaty soils, and on those that are habitually over-manured, the germs of anthrax are especially liable to be perpetuated. It has long been noticed that herbivorous animals are the most susceptible to anthrax, while the purely carnivorous, and to a less extent the omnivorous, have relatively a far higher resisting power. That the immunity is largely due to the food is manifest from the experiments of Feser on rats. Those fed on vegetable aliment contracted anthrax readily from inoculation, while those kept on an exclusive diet of flesh successfully resisted. The same rats that escaped while on a flesh diet were afterward placed on a vegetable diet, and then perished after inoculation.1 Davaine found the same to be true of foxes kept on meat and vegetables respectively, and inoculated with the virulent blood of the allied disease, septicæmia. He found, moreover, that guinea-pigs were much more susceptible to anthrax than rabbits. One-thousandth of a drop of virulent anthrax blood invariably killed the guinea-pig, while it left the rabbit unharmed.2 Klein has never found a rabbit insusceptible. It has recently been claimed that pigs are insusceptible, but I have known of many instances in which the offal of anthrax cattle, when devoured by pigs, has determined fatal anthrax in the latter. Chickens too prove much less susceptible to anthrax than the Herbivora. Inoculations made by Cohn and others proved invariably unsuccessful, while Pasteur has showed that they can be infected easily after the body has been cooled by partial immersion in cold water.3 Pasteur attributes this immunity to their normally high temperature, yet rabbits, sheep, pigs, wolves, and foxes, though maintaining a correspondingly high temperature, are still subject to anthrax. Even the herbivorous mammal suffering from acute anthrax fever has its temperature raised to that of the chicken, yet the disease progresses none the less surely to a fatal result. Again, anthrax liquids inoculated under the skin of a fox proved harmless, while if thrown into the warmer peritoneal cavity they proved fatal. It may well be suspected that the relative insusceptibility of chickens is in part due to the large amount of animal food consumed by them, and that the chilling process increases the receptivity by deranging sanguinification and nutrition.
1 Wochenschrift f. Thierheilkunde und Thiersucht, Nos. 24 and 25, 1879.