236 THE INDIAN JOURNAL OF VETERINARY SCIENCE AND ANIMAL HUSBANDRY [ I, III

The discovery of an easily marketable anti-fluke remedy is not only a progress
for treatment of the malady, but should have its effect and repercussence on pro-
phylaxis.

In practice fluke epidemics have for origin and point of departure the
scattering of marshy grass land, pools, ditches, and stagnant ponds with excrement
charged with eggs which emit individual parasites each day. The first thing to do
then is to suppress these sowers of germs, and this can be done by systematic ad-
ministration, preventive in some measure, of an anti-fluke agent to all the animals
(ailing or not) of a flock one knows to be affected ; one thus rids them of their
parasites in such a way that at this time they cannot any longer throw out infective
dejections. But to be effective this anti-fluke remedy should be administered three
times.

(1)Before putting out to pasture (about April) to expel the flukes of indivi-
duals affected, and thus avoid contamination of the ground.

(2) Five months later (about September) for that is about the necessary time for
adult worms to become egg layers. In effect it has to be recognised that a few
sheep escape the first treatment; their helminths therefore lay eggs which after two
or three months from cercaria, which in their turn, after two or three months, are
transformed after ingestion into adult distomes ; total five months. If one expels
them before this delay, one is then sure that they will not yet have been able to
produce eggs, and this is the reason for the September worming.

Finally, the third intervention two to three months later (towards November) after
the return from pasture, to destroy the trematodes, the issue of some cercaria which
may have been swallowed after the second treatment.

Thus, nothing but this rule of a three period anti-fluke treatment before, during,
and after pasturage will rid surely and periodically all the animals of their distomes
almost immediately after the arrival of these in the liver, before in all cases they
have had time to become adult egglayers. Vitan suppresses the voiding of eggs,
therefore no more flukes are possible.

With male fern this therapeutic preventive was not realisable, as stated before,
notable due to its too high and prohibitive price. But with a remedy as active, as
handy, and as marketable as Vitan, I am sure that breeders and rearers—far from
jibbing at the expense—will, on the contrary, ask for it. The benefits that they
will derive will far outweigh the monetary cost. Monsieur Marotel concludes by
hoping that all sheep breeders will unite for defensive measures against fluke, and
that the regional veterinary surgeons of departments will support measures against
fluke, and he assures them that if Vitan is used as he directs, the flukes of their
region will be suppressed, and that the terror of sheep-breeders in France and her
colonies will be definitely cleared away.