Causes: hot season, foul stables, streptococcus. Symptoms: sudden
attack, red, swollen, warm, tender pastern, vesicles, crusts, scabs,
lameness, foot rested on toe, cracks, fissures, interdigital foot rot,
shedding hoof, scaly chronic form. Treatment: clean stables and yards,
cleanse feet, lead lotion or zinc, phenol, iron or copper. Tar water,
tar, creolin, creosote, iodol.
This affection is comparable to the simpler forms of grease or digital
eczema in horses.
_Causes._ It occurs especially in the hot midsummer season in cattle
kept in filthy stables, where the feet and pasterns are kept filthy and
the air charged with irritant ammoniacal fumes. A streptococcus is
usually met with and may be found in pure cultures in resulting
abscesses.
_Symptoms._ The attack is sudden, the skin around the pastern becoming
red, warm, swollen and tender, with the formation of vesicles, isolated
or confluent, which rupture and discharge a serous exudate that dries up
into crusts and scabs. Lameness is a marked symptom and in bad cases the
swelling and pain are such that the foot may be habitually raised from
the ground and rested only on the toe. The swollen skin is thrown into
folds which rub on each other, and breaks open into cracks from which
exudes a serous fluid that macerates and irritates the skin, the heel
pad and the interdigital space, so as to determine interdigital foot
rot. This may lead to inflammation inside the hoof with shedding of the
horny mass, or it may subside into a chronic form with an abundant
squamous product.
_Treatment_ should be mainly prophylactic in the direction of
cleanliness and abundant litter in the stables, and the avoidance of
pools of liquid manure and of septic mud puddles in the yards and roads.
In the early stages of the affection the pasterns and interdigital
spaces should be thoroughly cleansed and covered with a bandage with a
weak solution of acetate of lead, or of sulphate of zinc, or carbolic
acid, or sulphate of iron or copper. In the more advanced stages tar
water or crude tar will serve a good purpose, or watery or alcoholic
solutions of creolin, creosote, oil of tar, carbolic acid or iodol. When
the horn has been separated from the quick, it is usually best to pare
away all such, to bevel the edges so as to make them less rigid and more
pliant and to dress with tar water and later to cover with undiluted tar
and bandage.