274 THE INDIAN JOURNAL OF VETERINARY SCIENCE AND ANIMAL HUSBANDRY [III, III.

to treatment that in our anxiety to seek relief from its depredations we are
perhaps too apt to seize upon any remedy for which success is claimed only to find
later that the claim is unreal and based on insufficient data. Contagious bovine
abortion is a self-limiting disease in which there is a decided tendency after the
first storm has blown over for the abortions to subside and for the affected animals to
acquire after the first one or two abortions a degree of resistance that enables them
to go through the normal period of gestation without a mishap which in the absence
of adequate controls is apt to be attributed to the supposed benefit of the particular
treatment that has been employed, while what has really happened is nothing more
than the normal process of recovery which would have ensued in the natural course
of events even if no treatment had been adopted. It is well known that agglutinins
may persist in the blood long after infection has been overcome. Their presence
merely indicates that either the animal is or has been infected while in some of the
experiments cited above an immediate fall in the agglutinin titre has been sought
for as evidence in support of the therapeutic value of the treatment adopted.
Breeding efficiency and agglutination titre, unless observations on the latter are
made for fairly prolonged periods, are therefore not a safe criterion in assessing the
value of any drug in the treatment or cure of contagious bovine abortion. In ap-
praising results in those cases in which a previously infected animal which has been
treated brings forth a normal calf at the end of a normal gestation period reliance
must necessarily be placed on the bacteriological examination of the milk, the vagi-
nal discharges and the fœtal membranes. It is very doubtful however whether any
drug, however potent it may be and however administered, can have any marked
effect on organisms lodged in such sheltered and inaccessible situations in the body
as the fœtal membranes and the tissues of the udder and perhaps some of the other
internal organs.

Chemotherapy has yielded encouraging results in the treatment of undulant
fever in man against which it would appear to be the most efficacious form of reme-
dy, the two products that have given the best results being gonacrine and mercuro-
chrome. Experiments with these two products in the treatment of contagious
bovine abortion have however yielded altogether negative results. These conflicting
results in the two cases according to Raymond Moussu and P. Courtehoux are due to
the fact that undulant fever in man represents a disease entity characterised by
symptoms of more or less protracted fever, profuse perspiration, asthenia, hypertro-
phy of the spleen, pain in the joints, etc. On the contrary in contagious bovine abor-
tion there is no clinical manifestation of the disease. These essential differences
separate human and animal brucellosis and explain the conflicting results obtained.
In human subjects considered as cured the characteristic symptoms disappear and