DAIRYING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3826, 28 October 1936, Page 7

DAIRYING

CONTAGIOUS ABORTION. It has always been a matter of debate whether vaccination should be regarded as a satisfactory method of controlling contagious aborition, particularly in view of the fact that vaccination with the living organism actualy infects the animal and makes it a possible serious source of infection, while it is the general opinion that killed vaccines are of no value. It should be noted that In the Veterinary Record for April 4th, 1936, an abstract of a report by Zeller and Stockmayer reports that these investigators tested four different types of killed vaccines. A number of heifers, two to four months pregnant, were used to test the value of these vaccines, and the cattle, as weli as the controls, were exposed to infection. The number of abortions which followed amongst the vaccinated animals was in proportion very nearly as high as the number amongst the controls, while a large percentage of the vaccinated animals suffered from retention of the after-birth and sterility. The abstractor comments that these findings clearly indicate that no useful result followed the injection of any of the vaccines tested. According to the report for Sep-tember-October, 1935, of the International Office of Epizootics, the Swiss authorities, in their bulletin dealing with the struggle against contagious abortion prescribed that the use of living or killed vaccines is prohibited, and it is observed that according to the same authority the German Government has taken the same stand regarding living organisms. As regards the treatment of contagious abortion by means of drugs, the German official circular of instructions quoted by the International Office of Epizootics, in 1935, states as follows: “In spite of the effects of veterinary and chemicopharmaceutical science, it has not been possible to find, up the present, an effective curative drug.” Recent advices from Holland, quoted in the Veterinary Bulletin for 1936, are to the effect that drug treatment and immune serum treatment have been found useless. On the other hand, this Dutch authority regards vaccination as of value. Professor Finzi, of Italy, summing up the question at the last International Veterinary

Congress, is quoted as stating that favourable results claimed for drug treatment or vaccination have generally been due to improved sanitary methods.