2. _United States._--"Joseph MacFarland and E. M. Ranck, in
addition to a synopsis of the method of manufacture of
tetanus-antitoxin, give some facts of interest and importance in
regard to its use for prophylaxis and treatment. The studies
were made upon several hundred horses used for the production
of various immunised serums in one of the large laboratories of
the United States. The horses, because of the constant
manipulations, frequently became infected with tetanus, and in
1897 and 1898, when scrupulous cleanliness and disinfection were
the only precautions employed to prevent the disease, the
death-rate varied from 8 to 10 per cent. During 1899 nearly two
hundred horses were subjected to systematic immunisation with
tetanus-antitoxin; and, in spite of otherwise similar
conditions, the death-rate descended to 1 per cent." (_Medical
Annual_, 1901.)
The preventive use of the antitoxin has, of course, a very limited
range outside veterinary surgery. Tetanus, thanks to the use of
antiseptic or aseptic methods, not only in hospital surgery but also
in amateur and domestic surgery, has become a very rare disease,
except in tropical countries. It is no longer a "hospital disease";
and, even in war, it no longer has anything like the frequency that it
had, for instance, in the War of the Rebellion. A student may now go
all his time at a large hospital without seeing more than a very few
cases. But, now and again, attention is called to some wholly
unsuspected risk of the disease. For example, certain cases of tetanus
occurred in Dundee among workers at the jute-mills there:--
"The last victim was a female worker in the jute-mill, who, six
days after a crushed and lacerated wound of the foot, developed
tetanus and died within twenty-four hours. Some of the dust,
taken from under the machine in which the foot was crushed, was
found to contain an unusually large number of tetanus-bacilli.
The source of the jute used is India." (_Medical News_, August
1900.)
Again, at the Gebaer Anstalt at Prague, in 1899, an outbreak of
tetanus occurred, with several deaths; but it was stopped when a
preventive dose of the antitoxin was given to the new patients on
admission.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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