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36
ROYAL COMMISSION ON TUBERCULOSIS-
The second Interim Report of the Royal Commission, appointed on the
31st August, 1901, to enquire into the relations of Human and Animal
Tuberculosis, was issued in January, 1907.
The reference to this Commission was to enquire and report with respect to
tuberculosis.
(1.) Whether the disease in animals and man is one and the same.
(2.) Whether animals and man can be reciprocally infected with it.
(3.) Under what conditions, if at all, the transmission of disease
from animals to man takes place, and what are the circumstances,
favourable or unfavourable, to such transmission.
It will be remembered that this enquiry was instituted in consequence of a
pronouncement by Dr. Koch at the British Congress on Tuberculosis in 1901,
when he expressed the following opinion :—
"I feel justified in maintaining that human tuberculosis differs from
"bovine, and cannot be transmitted to cattle.
"The infection of human beings (from animals) is but a very rare
"occurrence. 1 should estimate the extent of infection by the milk and
"flesh of tubercular cattle, and the butter made of their milk, as hardly
"greater than that of hereditary transmission, and I therefore do not
"deem it advisable to take any measures against it."
These views being in opposition to those held by the majority of experts
who had studied the subject, and as, if accepted, they would have involved
the abandonment of all inspection and destruction of meat affected with
tuberculosis, it became imperative that the question should be the subject of
an immediate and exhaustive investigation.
In May, 1904, the Commission were in a position to prove that human
tuberculosis could be transmitted to cattle, and on the 13th May of that year
issued a first interim report, which stated :—
"We have thought it our duty to make this short interim report for
"the reason that the result at which we have arrived, namely, that
"tubercle of human origin can give rise in the bovine animal to
"tuberculosis identical with ordinary bovine tuberculosis, seems to us to
"show quite clearly that it would be most unwise to frame or modify
"legislative measures in accordance with the view that human and
"bovine tubercle bacilli are specifically different from each other, and
"that the disease caused bv one is a wholly different thing from the
"disease caused by the other."