Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals: Including Some Account of the EctozoaCobbold, T. Spencer (Thomas Spencer)
Science
Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals: Including Some Account of the Ectozoa
Cobbold, T. Spencer (Thomas Spencer)
Helminths; Parasites
From what has been stated it follows that personal and general
cleanliness are eminently serviceable as preventions against infection,
but to ensure perfect success other precautions must be exercised,
especially in relation to our contact with and management of dogs.
Leuckart puts this very clearly when he says:--“In order to escape the
dangers of infection, the dog must be watched, not only within the
house, but whilst he is outside of it. He must not be allowed to visit
either slaughter-houses or knackeries, and care must be taken that
neither the offals nor hydatids found in such places are accessible to
him. In this matter the sanitary inspector has many important duties
to perform. The carelessness with which these offals have hitherto
been disposed of, or even purposely given to the dog, must no longer
be permitted if the welfare of the digestive organs of mankind is to
be considered. What blessed results may follow from these precautions
may be readily gathered from the consideration of the fact that, at the
present time, almost the sixth part of all the inhabitants annually
dying in Iceland fall victims to the echinococcus epidemic” (l. c., s.
654). Similar measures had previously been recommended in less explicit
terms by Küchenmeister, who in effect remarked that the principal thing
was to ensure the destruction of the echinococcus vesicles. He also
recommended the expulsion and annihilation of the _Tænia echinococcus_.
In order to carry out this idea, it was suggested by Dr Leared that
every dog should be periodically physicked, and that all the excreta,
tapeworms included, should be buried at a considerable depth in the
soil. I advised, however, that in place of burying the excreta, _they
should, in all cases, be burnt._ I had, indeed, long previously urged
this measure (in a paper “on the _Sclerostoma_ causing the gape-disease
of fowls,” published in 1861), with the view of lessening the prevalence
of entozoa in general, whether of man or animals. The rule I suggested
stood as follows:--_All entozoa which are not preserved for scientific
investigation or experiment should be thoroughly destroyed by fire, when
practicable, and under no circumstances whatever should they be thrown
aside as harmless refuse._ As an additional security I recommended that
boiling hot water be occasionally thrown over the floor of all kennels
where dogs are kept. In this way not only would the escaped tapeworms be
effectually destroyed, but also their eggs and egg-contents, including
the six-hooked embryos. These measures were again advocated at the
Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1862, and also more
fully in a paper communicated to the Zoological Society, during the
autumn of the same year (‘Proceedings,’ vol. xxx, pt. 3, pp. 288, 315).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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