CATTLE DISEASE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 253, 25 September 1939, Page 5

CATTLE DISEASE.

ARGENTINE RESEARCH. Writing from the Argentine to friends in New Zealand, Mr lan Davidson, a young New Zealander, says that research with the object of coping with foot-and-mouth disease is progressing in that country. He says that one veterinarian has been able to isolate tho microbe and has a vaccine which he claims will enable the affected stock to recover quickly. “He has been at research for 36 years,” Mr Davidson writes. “It was only five years ago that he was able to isolate the microbe. He now has a vaccine that lie claims will not only enable affected stock to recover quickly, but will make stock unaffected immune for about a year. Be carried out a trial on about a dozen cattle from two different mobs and tho manager was satisfied with the results. So wo carried on and did about 1090 before the man in charge ran out of vaccine. One mob of young cows had only arrived from a camp further south about a week before vaccination. It is almost a sure thing for stock that have been railed in trucks to got aftosa, the name by which the disease is known here. If was due to break out among this particular mob, so if none of them develop it now I think it will be a good enough test of the vaccine. FIRST BIG EXPERIMENT. “This is tho first occasion this man has vaccinated in a big way. Previously liphad only done a few for his own guidance. He has been to England and the Continent of Europe investigating, but there they were inclined to think him a crank, he said, and he got no help. He showed us a photograph of a living microbe in boiled meat and in milk, j and said that neither boiling nor fire would kill the germ. “He says that- stock in nearly every country have the germ, but it is only in certain climatic conditions that the disease breaks out, and that accounts for New Zealand, and I think Canada also, for not having it. Cancer in the human body, be is caused by this aftosa microbe. Whether he is right or wrong time will prove, but I say good luck to him. It will mean a.good deal to everybody if he is on the right track.”