View report page

The appointment of the Commission was due to the announcement
made by Professor Koch, at the International Medical Congress held in
London in 1900, of his opinion that human and bovine tuberculosis
were distinct affections. He asserted on that occasion, as the result of
his experiments and enquiries, that the bacillus of human tuberculosis
was unable to give rise to tuberculosis in the ox, and maintained that
bovine tuberculosis could not be the cause of tuberculosis in man. The
Commission, in their first interim report, were able to show that they
had succeeded, where Professor Koch had failed, in communicating
human tuberculosis to bovine animals, and that his assumptions, even
if they had any foundation, were at least too sweeping to be accepted as
guides to conduct or to legislation.
The present report carries the matter considerably further, the
Commissioners say definitely that the effects produced on animals by
the injection of tuberculous matter from human sources, appear to them
to be absolutely identical with the effects of the bacillus of bovine
tuberculosis. They have wholly failed to discover any essential
differences between the one and the other; both are equally virulent—
i.e., equally able to set up tuberculosis in bovine and other animals.
The general results so far attained by the enquiry are summed up
in the following conclusions:—
"There can be no doubt but that in a certain number of cases the
tuberculosis occurring in the human subject, especially in children, is