Abstract
THE Fourth Progress Report of the Foot-and-Mouth Disease Research Committee, just issued, is a record of extremely interesting observations and experiments. We agree with the Committee when it says that “the knowledge of foot-and-mouth disease and the conditions which promote the infection and the means of its prevention have been materially advanced by work in many parts of the world, and that the researchers in this country have taken their fair share in furthering that progress”. It is true that we have still no very clear vision of the time when scientific methods of prevention and spread are to be substituted for slaughter. The causal virus is familiar and the disease can be produced experimentally with it. Further, it has been clearly demonstrated that with this virus, weakened in various ways, immunity against the disease can be produced. This immunity, however, does not seem to last very long, and until the virus can be grown on artificial media, sufficient of it cannot be obtained to do a very large series of immunisation experiments. The work of Prof, and Mrs. Maitland in Manchester gives us hope of culture, for they have shown quite conclusively that multiplication of the virus will take place in the presence of living embryo tissue of guinea-pigs. This is a decided advance.
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BEATTIE, J. Foot-and-Mouth Disease Research*. Nature 128, 765–766 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128765b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128765b0