Notes

Abstract

FOLLOWING on the announcement last week of the appointment of an expert committee of investigation into the etiology, &c., of foot-and-mouth disease comes the interesting and, if it should be confirmed, important announcement of the discovery of the causal organism of this serious animal scourge. This claim has been put forward by a German bacteriologist, Dr. Siegel, in a paper read at the annual Congress of Prussian Veterinary Surgeons in Berlin. Dr. Siegel claims to have found the organism in the blood stream and in the local lesions in affected animals, to. have cultivated it in artificial media, and that in experimenting with his organism it has satisfied the postulates of Koch. Moreover, he claims to be able to produce some degree of immunity to the disease. Details of this interesting paper are not yet to hand; and in the meantime the claim must be accepted with the reserve which must obviously be accorded to the statement of the discovery of an organism that has up to the present eluded vigorous and systematic research by other experts of almost all nationalities. In the meantime, the full details of experiments will be anxiously awaited; and if they warrant it, it will be one of the first duties of the British expert committee to investigate them carefully, and either to confirm or refute the claims of Dr. Siegel. Should the discovery be confirmed, it will indeed be an enormous boon to the whole agricultural world.