Text book of veterinary medicine, Volume 4 (of 5)Law, James
Science
Text book of veterinary medicine, Volume 4 (of 5)
Law, James
Veterinary medicine
insomnia, bad dreams, fever, thirst, spasms of throat when seeing,
hearing or taking liquids, dyspnœa, retching, vomiting, spasms, roused
by noise, squinting, dilated pupils, mental delusions, reticence,
taciturnity, suspicion, mania, exhaustion, paresis, paralysis.
Lyssophobia, its detection and cure.
_Synonyms._ Canine madness; Rabidus Canis; Lyssa; Lytta; Cynolyssa.
_Definition._ Rabies is an acute, infectious disease, affecting the
cerebral and medullary nervous centres and characterized by
intellectual, emotional, aggressive and other nervous disorders and by
extreme reflex excitability.
_Animals susceptible._ While the disease is seen most frequently in the
canine races (dogs, wolves, foxes and jackals), and in the cat family
(cat, lion), it is liable to spread widely among animals that use the
teeth as weapons of offense, and such as they can readily attack. When
inoculated, all warm blooded animals contract the disease. Thus the
carnivora and omnivora (dog, wolf, fox, hyena, jackal, cat, lion, badger
and skunk and, to a less extent, the pig and horse) may become active
propagators of the infection, which may spread widely among their
herbivorous victims (cattle, sheep, goats, deer, rats, mice, chickens
and pigeons) through their bites. Man suffers mainly through the attacks
of dogs, cats and, in certain localities, wolves or skunks, but he is
also liable to become infected from handling rabid domestic herbivora.
Different genera differ in susceptibility, the receptivity being
apparently greatest in the carnivora.
_Geographical Distribution._ Rabies is confined to no country nor
climate but it attains its greatest prevalence in the north temperate
zone, where there is the densest population and where activity of travel
favors the propagation of infection. The facility for inoculation is the
one determining cause, thus the islands of Australia, Tasmania, New
Zealand, the Azores and St. Helena have never suffered and the first
three exclude the disease by rigid inspection and quarantine. During the
Hamburg epizoötic of 1852–53, the islands in the Elbe escaped though
both banks were ravaged. Again, where the muzzling of all dogs has been
rigidly enforced, as in many German cities and districts the disease has
been practically extirpated.
_Etiology._ Long before the days of pathological bacteriology rabies was
recognized by veterinarians as a disease due to infection alone. Its
absence from the various countries above named, and from South and West
Africa, its rapid propagation in other countries (La Plata, Malta, Hong
Kong) into which it had been introduced for the first time, and its
restriction and disappearance wherever muzzling had been strictly
carried out, had practically settled this question. The development of
the disease in animals which had been experimentally inoculated was no
less significant of this truth.
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