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35
SCARLET FEVER ALLEGED TO BE DISSEMINATED
BY THE MILK OF DISEASED COWS.
In my Annual Report for 1885 I stated that scarlet fever had
recently acquired a new interest for sanitarians, as the result of an
outbreak in certain districts in London and at Hendon, inquiry
into which had led Mr. W. H. Power, Second Assistant Medical
Officer to the Local Government Board, to believe that the
disease might be of bovine origin ; and, after describing the
symptoms of the cow disease which was the supposed cause of
the outbreak, I mentioned that the services of Dr. Klein had
been called in, and that that gentleman was engaged in a study,
at the Brown Institution, of the pathology of the disease. Dr.
Klein's report, subsequently presented, confirmed the views
expressed by Mr. Power, which, moreover, were approved by Dr.
George Buchanan, Medical Officer to the Local Government
Beard, who in his observations on the subject remarked that:—
" In its own province, Dr. Klein's report is as important and interesting
as Mr. Power's, and its more immediate significance lies in the complete
harmony between the conclusions obtained from Mr. Power's
etiological researches, and the influences, as to communicability and
other characters, of the Hendon cow disease, that follow from pathological
enquiry. By the inoculation into calves, either directly of
the discharges from cow-ulcers, or indirectly of sub cultures of those
discharges artificially prepared, Dr. Klein has succeeded in producing
now local, now general disease in the calf ; disease having unmistakable
affinities, under some conditions, with the Hendon cow-disease ;
under other conditions, with scarlatina in the human subject:—on
the one hand, ulcers on the skin of the calf anatomically identical with
the ulcers on the teats of milch cows ; on the other hand, general
disease in the calf, at first of inconspicuous nature, but passing on
to serious changes in the internal organs, more particularly in the
kidneys of the calf; the more characteristic of these changes being
anatomically identical with those resulting in the human subject from
the operation of the scarlatina poison."
It may be added that Dr. Klein, after complete study of
the cow-disease, found that " as regards the feeding capacity of
affocted animals, their milking power, and their body