Papers presented last summer at the French Congress for Tuberculosis
at Paris demonstrate, says _The Medical News_, what has hitherto been
very doubtful, that aviary and human tuberculosis are essentially the
same pathologic process due to the same germ modified by a cultural
environment, but convertible under favorable circumstances one into the
other. An Englishman has found that more than ten per cent. of canaries
and other song birds that die in captivity succumb to tuberculosis, and
parrots have come in for a share of condemnation in this connection.
By far the larger number of monkeys who die in captivity are carried
off by tuberculosis, and while, fortunately, the keeping of monkeys as
house pets is not very general, at the same time there is some danger
of contagion. Nocard, the greatest living authority on tuberculosis in
animals, and the man to whom we owe the best culture methods for the
tubercle bacillus, found in a series of autopsies on dogs that out of
two hundred successive autopsies on unselected dogs that died at the
great veterinary school at Alfort, near Paris, in more than one-half
the cases there were tubercular lesions, and in many of them the
lesions were of such a character as to make them facile and plenteous
disseminators of infective tuberculous materials.
Parrots are known to be susceptible to a disease peculiar to
themselves, and a number of fatal cases in human beings of what was at
first supposed to be malignant influenza, pneumonia was traced to the
bacillus which is thought to be the cause of the parrot disease. Cats
are sometimes known to have tuberculosis, and that they have in many
cases been carriers of diphtheria and other ordinary infections is more
than suspected. There is not at present any great need for a crusade
on sanitary grounds against the keeping of pet animals, but they are
multiplying more and more, and it does not seem unreasonable that
greater care in the matter of determining the first signs of disease
should be demanded of their owners, and then so guarding them as to
prevent their being a source of contagion to human beings. Attention
should be paid to this warning as regards children, as animals play
more freely with them and the children are more apt to be infected.