Animal Diseases

by L. T. GILTNER

Nicotinic acid is vital to the diet of swine as evidenced by these two groups of pigs.

The above group was fed a purified diet that excluded nicotinic acid, while the group below had liberal amounts of the vitamin. As a part of their feed both groups received thiamine, riboflavin, piridoxine, pantothentic acid, and choline. For New Ideas in Feeding see page 95.

VETERINARIANS and farmers have waged an aggressive fight against animal plagues in recent years. They have kept malignant ones like rinderpest and foot-and-mouth disease, a constant threat from abroad, out of the United States. The worst native diseases, anthrax, anaplasmosis, brucellosis, mastitis, hog cholera, swine erysipelas, tuberculosis, rabies, and pullorum disease, they held in check by applying approved control plans, including sanitation, vaccination, and treatment with drugs.

Some of the vaccines, notably those for preventing rabies and hog cholera, have been improved. All the biological products used in the control work have been maintained at a high standard of quality. Experimental studies on the sulfa drugs have done much to show which infections are amenable to treatment with them. Sulfanilamide, Sulfathiazole, and sulfadiazine are useful in treating some types of streptococcal infections, but ineffective against some other bacterial infections. Sulfathiazole, sulfaguanadine, and sulfadiazine have value against some forms of dysentery. Sulfathiazole alleviates symptoms of coryza in chickens, although the symptoms reappear when treatment is stopped. Sulfamerazine acts somewhat the same against infectious sinusitis in turkeys. Sulfamerazine, although having a favorable influence against coccidiosis in chickens, is not effective against lymphomatosis.

Penicillin is beneficial, experimentally and in practice, in treating the type of mastitis that is caused by Streptococcus agalactiae. It has shown marked curative effect on experimentally induced swine erysipelas infection in turkeys. It was not effective in treating infectious equine anemia, a virus disease, and so far has had no value in preventing or treating other virus diseases. Of course, the sulfa drugs and penicillin, like all new drugs, should be used only as prescribed by a veterinarian; their indiscriminate use may be wasteful and actually harmful to the animal patients.

But all this is not to say that we have cured or are about to cure all diseases of animals. Much remains to be learned and done, as the following pages, in which I discuss some of the worst diseases, disclose.