Then, while repetitions of Koch's experiment, upon which his
announcement was based, of inoculating calves and young cattle with
_human_ bacilli have proved that a certain number of them can be, under
appropriate circumstances, made to develop tuberculosis, that number has
never been a large percentage of the animals tested, and in many cases
the infection has been a local one, or of a mild type, which has
resulted in recovery. Lastly, while a number of bacilli, with _bovine_
culture and other characteristics, have been recovered from the bodies
of children dying of tuberculosis, and these bacilli have proved
virulent to calves when injected into them, yet, as a matter of
historical fact, the actual number of instances in which children or
other human beings have been definitely proved to have contracted the
disease from the milk of a tuberculous cow is still exceedingly and
encouragingly small. A careful study of the entire literature of the
past twenty years, some three years ago, revealed _only thirty-seven
cases_; and of these thirty-seven Koch's careful investigations have
since disproved the validity of nine.
On the other hand, it is anything but safe to accept Koch's practical
dictum and neglect the meat and milk of cattle as a source of danger in
tuberculosis. First, because the degree of our immunity against the
bovine bacilli is still far from settled; and, second, because, while
bacteriologists are fairly agreed that the _avian_, the _bovine_, and
the _human_ represent three distinct and different variations, if not
species, of the bacillus, they are almost equally agreed that they are
probably the descendants of one common species, which may possibly be a
bacillus commonly found upon meadow grasses, particularly the well-known
timothy, and hence very frequently in the excreta of cattle, and known
as the _grass bacillus_ or _dung bacillus_ of M[oe]ller. This bacillus
has all the staining, morphological, and even growth characteristics of
the tubercle bacillus except that it produces only local irritation and
little nodular masses, if injected into animals. Our knowledge of its
existence is, however, of great practical importance, inasmuch as it
warned us that in our earlier studies of the bacilli contained in milk
and butter we have been mistaking this organism for a genuine tubercle
bacillus. As a consequence, of late years our tests for the presence of
tubercle bacilli in milk are made not only by searching for the organism
with the microscope, but also by injecting the centrifugated sediment of
the infected milk into guinea pigs, to see if it proves infectious. Many
of our earlier statements as to the presence of tubercle bacilli in milk
and butter are now invalidated on this account.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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