FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE

Southland Times, Issue 23945, 11 October 1939, Page 11

FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE

CLAIM OF EFFECTIVE VACCINE RESULTS OF ARGENTINIAN RESEARCH Writing from the Argentine to friends in Wanganui, 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 the microbe and has a vaccine which he claims will enable the affected stock to recover quickly. “He has been at research for 3.6 years,” Mr Davidson writes to Mrs E. M. Shadbolt, Wanganui. “It was only five years ago that he was able to isolate the microbe. He now has a vaccine that he claims will not only enable affected stock to recover quickly, but will make stock unaffected immune for about a year. We carried out a trial on about a dozen cattle from two different mobs and the manager was satisfied with the results. So we carried on and did about 1000 before the chap 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 get aftosa, the name by which the disease is known here. It 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. “This is the first occasion this man has vaccinated in a big way. Previously, he had 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, and said that neither boiling nor fire would kill the germ. /‘He says that stock in nearly every country has 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, not having it. Cancer in the human body, he says, 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. “All, or most, of these new-fangled ideas are scoffed at for a start by some.’