NEW USE FOR HORSE SERUM.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VI, Issue 301, 30 April 1896, Page 9

NEW USE FOR HORSE SERUM.

Under the above beading, a very interesting article appeared in the Napier Telegraph last week, and, although not exactly a sporting item, we are glad to reprint it, just to show how valuable a healthy horse may be to a district stricken with diphtheria. As far as we are able to judge it appears it would be better to render a horse immune before taking any of the serum, because there are numbers of horses that are not healthy, and by rendering them immune, there would apparently be more certainty of getting pure serum. The following is the article referred to “ Serum is a word that has been much used o late years in connection with prophylatic surgery’ and especially in connection with the most modern form of the latter, the antitoxin treatment for diphtheria. Serum is the liquor which is left when blood is allowed to coagulate and the clotted red matter is taken away. In the preparation of serum for treating diphtheria a healthy horse is inoculated with the bacilli of the disease a certain number of times. His system conouers the poison, and at last there comes a time when injections of the diphtheritic poison fail to cause any manifestation of evil effects. The horse is then said to be immune. To utilise him as a means to the curing of diphtheria in human beings, or the prevention of the disease in them, his blood is drawn off as wanted, is allowed to clot, the serum is separated, and a definite quantity of this serum constitutes a dose for hypodermic injection. So far, the use of horse serum is fairly well known. But now a Spanish doctor is using it for quite different reasons, and apparently with success. The serum he injects is not from horses rendered ‘immune against disease, but from the healthiest horses he can find His object is to procure pure blood serum, his theory being that it will act as a general strengthener of weak human constitutions. His experiments have been carried out with children in the wards of a hospital at Barcelona. He injects doses of serum daily for two or three weeks, or until a cure is effected in some few cases, and he has found it act as a remarkably powerful tonic. The red corpuscles of the blood increases in number, the child increases in weight, and becomes stronger. It is said that there is no untoward secondary effects, and that the good effects of the injections upon weakly children are quickly manifested. Among other cures asserted, it is reported that sixteen cases of chorea (St. Vitus s dance) were cured in a period for each case of fifteen days on an average.” The British Medical Journal also notes the value of horse serum for typhoid fever “In the course of a communication to the Baris Societe de Biologie, on February 22, on the Early Diagnosis of Typhoid Fever by a Bacteriological Examination of the Stools, M. Chantemesse said that last June he had succeeded in immunising several horses against the virus of typhoid fever. He had obtained the serum of such strength, that one-fifth of a drop inoculated into a guinea-pig twenty-four hours before infection protected it against a dose of typhoid virus fatal to animals not previously in jested with the protective serum. It was ascertained, also, that injections of the serum produced no injurious effects upon a healthy man. M. Chantemesse stated-that he had since employed injections of serum in three cases of typhoid fever. The temperature showed a regular fall from the time the first injection was made, and seven days after the commencement of the injections all three patients were quite free from fever, and bad commenced to convalesce. M. Chantemesse added that the cases were not yet sufficiently numerous to permit any trustworthy conclusion to be drawn.”