Texas fever

“ Tuberculosis has now become the great scourge of dairy cows and other highly bred cattle, ruining many of the best herds and threatening the health of the consumers of milk, if not also of beef. Texas fever, a disease of cattle first studied in the United States, but now known to be widely disseminated over the South American, African, and Australian continents, has during late years retarded operations for improving and increasing the stock of cattle, and has seriously restricted the marketing of animals from the infected districts. ”

“ In Texas fever the ticks which transmit the disease, after filling with the infected blood, drop off and lay eggs which contain the parasites, and the disease is propagated by the young ticks in whom the parasites have multiplied. ”

“ Don't ask me to explain Texas fever. It's one of the mysteries of the trail. The very cattle that impart it after a winter in the north catch the fever and die like sheep. It seems to exist, in a mild form, in through, healthy cattle, but once imparted to native or northern wintered stock, it becomes violent and is usually fatal. The sure, safe course is to fear and avoid it."
The two foremen were off at an early hour. Priest was again in charge of Lovell's lead herd, and leaving the horse that he had ridden to the Republican River in care of the boys, he loitered a moment at parting. ”

“ Thus the few animals that were used in the investigation of the nature of Texas fever in cattle and the means by which its virus is transmitted have saved thousands and thousands of cattle from suffering and death from that disease. It is to be hoped that eventually science may give us a substitute for experimental animals. However, the protection against disease that is afforded the flocks and herds of our country warrants the most hearty and loyal support of the principles underlying the present methods of control. ”

“ About 10 per cent of all such cattle taken into the South die of Texas fever, even after they are immunized by blood inoculations, and about 60 per cent of them succumb to Texas fever when not so treated. As they are usually very expensive animals and of a highly valued strain of blood, the loss in certain cases is excessive and in others almost irreparable, owing to the possible extinction of some particular type especially selected for the improvement of the herd. ”

“ Rinderpest on the steppes of Asia is comparatively harmless to the native stock, but among outside cattle imported into the steppes or attacked in their native lands it is habitually fatal. Texas fever is mild among the indigenous cattle in the Gulf States, but very deadly to Northern stock. Glanders is not at all fatal to horses of the plains, the Rockies, or the Sierras; but it becomes redoubtable when these horses carry it to the Eastern seaboard, and still more so in Western Europe. ”

“ They will not develop it even under conditions that would surely mean infection for a person from outside this zone. Certain of our common diseases which we regard as of little consequence become very serious matters when introduced among a people that has never known them before. The cattle of the southern states are immune to the Texas fever, but let northern cattle be sent south or let the ticks which transmit the disease be taken north where they can get on cattle there, and the results are disastrous. ”

“ Another instance in which it is difficult to figure the injury done by the ticks is in the case of death of nonimmune cattle in the tick-free pastures of the South. Such animals are as susceptible to Texas fever as nonimmune northern cattle, and inasmuch as there is in many States only one out of every four farms infested with ticks, the cattle on the remaining farms will in many cases contract Texas fever when exposed to the fever tick. ”

“ Seldom does a Southern State discover yellow fever within its own borders. It is always Mississippi that finds the infection in New Orleans, and Louisiana that finds it in Galveston. This apparently curious condition of affairs is explicable readily enough, on the ground that no State wishes to discover the germ in its own veins, but is quite willing, for commercial reasons, [pg 248] to point out the bacillus in the system of its neighbor. In 1897 Texas was infected pretty widely with yellow fever; but pressure on the boards of health kept them from reporting it for what it was. ”

“ The presence of ticks upon the cattle does not necessarily indicate disease. They are purely external, like fleas on a dog, and do not prove that the body is in an unhealthy condition. It may be a curious fact, the cause of which is not yet fully explained, that these cattle range in the South without developing in themselves or communicating too thers this Texas fever, while, when brought into the temperate zone, they seem to communicate it freely and in a most dangerous form. ”

“ As one of these witnesses testified that Oak and Bee counties in Texas were known to be permanently infected with the fever, and as the court found that these counties were a part of the infected district, and also found that the cattle in question were shipped from those counties into the territory of New Mexico, and that the defendants were notified by the plaintiffs of the existence of such disease in these counties at the time they drove their cattle across plaintiffs' range ”

“ Dow informed me, in his visit to Philadelphia in the year 1800, that the natives and old citizens of New-Orleans who retired into the country, and returned during the prevalence of the yellow fever in that city, the year before, were often affected by it, while all such persons as did not change their residence, escaped it. The danger from visiting an infected city is greater to persons who breathe an atmosphere of a uniform temperature, than one that is subject to alternate changes in its degrees of heat and cold. ”

“ I will say, parenthetically, in the way of right information relative to the South, that there has been no epidemic since 1878—twenty years; that it has been proven that yellow fever does not originate in any part of the United States, and that it is very effectively barred out at quarantine, or, if accidentally admitted, that it is easily killed by present means of treatment, and that an epidemic is no longer mentioned as a possibility—only as quite a remote memory—in New Orleans, or elsewhere in the South. ”

“ No convalescents are discharged from quarantine until free from infection, and whenever possible this is determined by bacteriological examination.
The United States quarantine regulations provide for inspection of but six diseases, yellow fever, typhus fever, bubonic plague, leprosy, smallpox and cholera. A few facts relative to these will make plain the nature of the special precautions necessary to exclude them.
Yellow fever is the great sanitary curse of the tropical Americas. It is an acute non-contagious fever of unknown causation. ”

“ It prevailed, at the same time, in Sussex county and near Woodbury, in New-Jersey. Sporadic cases of it likewise occurred in New-York and Boston, and in Portsmouth, in New-Hampshire. The chronic fever was epidemic in several of the towns of North-Carolina; cases of fever, which terminated in a swelling and mortification of the legs, and in death on the third day, appeared on the waters of the Juniata, in Pennsylvania; and bilious fevers, of a highly inflammatory grade, were likewise common near Germantown and Frankford, in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia. ”

“ Besides being a source of discomfort, the louse is the sole carrier of one of the most dread diseases that afflict mankind—typhus fever. In bygone times typhus was known variously as army fever, camp fever, or jail fever. It was particularly prevalent in this country at the time of the Revolution, and it existed to some extent here during the Civil War—an indication of what must have been the condition of individual American soldiers in those days. Typhus exists to-day practically as an endemic on the central plateau of Mexico, the range of the disease touching the border of the United States. ”

“ Water from rivers and streams running near where many people live is likely to be made impure and is sure to bring sickness and death to some of those who use it. Water from a small stream at Plymouth, Pennsylvania, running past a house occupied by a typhoid patient, gave the fever to over a thousand persons in one month. The water from a small stream at Ithaca, New York, gave the fever to over thirteen hundred people in one season, and an almost equal number caught the fever in a few weeks at Butler, Pennsylvania, by drinking water from a small creek along which some sick persons lived. ”

“ All these modes of removing the causes of malignant and yellow fevers, and of promoting strict and universal cleanliness, are of more consequence in the middle and northern states of America, than in countries uniformly warm, inasmuch as the disease may be taken as often as our inhabitants are exposed to its sources. In the West-Indies, a second attack of the yellow fever is prevented by the insensibility induced upon the system, by its being constantly exposed to the impressions of heat and exhalation. ”

“ In our own country it prevails from time to time in every State of the Union, committing its ravages as well among the rocks and hills of New England as in the more fertile valleys of the West and South. In many of the newly-settled portions of our country malarial fevers are, as is well known, exceedingly rife. In proportion, however, as towns and cities spring up, and as the land is properly drained, they diminish in frequency, and are gradually replaced, to a certain extent at least, by typhoid fever ”

“ In most large cities, however, limited epidemic outbursts of the disease occur from time to time, under the conditions of over crowding and poverty, although the increased facilities possessed by local authorities for recognizing such out breaks, and for the prompt isolation or removal of infected persons to hospitals, operate in general effectually to prevent any extensive spread of the fever. All ages are liable to typhus, but the young suffer less severely than the old. ”

“ Physicians have no offices, nor do they, as a general rule, call upon their patients. When an invalid is not able to go to the doctor, he is expected to die. Yellow fever, cholera, and consumption are unknown; while intermittent fevers, dysentery, and liver complaints, so prevalent on the coast, are uncommon. The ordinary diseases are catarrhal affections and typhoid fever. Cases of inflammation of the lungs are rare; more coughing may be heard during a Sunday service in a New England meeting-house than in six months in Quito. ”

“ We have only to consider what is the chief channel by which the contagion gets exit from the system, to know by what means we are most likely to prevent its passing into the surrounding atmosphere. In typhoid fever the poison passes off in the stools; and what we have to do is to see that these are promptly and properly disinfected and disposed of. In small-pox, scarlet fever, typhus fever, and measles, it is eliminated by the skin, and we can not altogether prevent its getting into the atmosphere ”

“ Until recently the most reliable test of health rights not enforced was the number of cases of preventable, communicable, contagious, infectious, transmissible diseases, such as smallpox, typhoid fever, yellow fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough. By noticing streets and houses where these diseases occurred, students learned a century ago that the darker and more congested the street the greater the prevalence of fevers and the greater the chance that one attacked would die. ”

“ The contagion, -like that of typhus, appears to be most active in the immediate vicinity of the patient and to be greatly lessened by the access of fresh air. It is capable of being conveyed by clothing. The incubation of the disease is about one week. The symptoms of the fever then show themselves with great abruptness and violence by a rigor, accompanied with pains in the limbs and severe headache. ”

“ There are a number of contagious diseases which, while comparatively unimportant in the number of deaths, yet are of concern because the cause of the disease is so well known that the means of prevention is quite within our power. Of these, typhoid fever, in New York State in 1908, among the rural population alone resulted in 437 deaths, a rate of 18.7 per 100,000 population. ”

“ Endemic in the American tropics, it had an unaccountable and disconcerting way of breaking out in epidemic form in the cities and villages of the Temperate Zone of North America. In at least 35 years of the 18th century, yellow fever invaded the United States, extending as far north as Nantucket Island, where 259 persons died of it in 1763, and New York, where there were 2,300 deaths in 1798, and raching a climax of destructiveness in 1793, with 4,041 deaths in 6 weeks among the 40,144 inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the Capital City of the Nation. ”

“ The last and the first months of the year, then, are the safest in which to pass through Vera Cruz, and the midsummer months the most dangerous. Although the fever commences in May, it is generally at its worst in August and September, as it requires a certain time for the germs of the disease to develop. The disease first attacks strangers in the country, especially those from a colder climate, where frost occurs; and it has been observed by Humboldt that among people from the table-lands of Mexico the mortality is relatively greater than among visitors coming from over the sea. ”