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Contagious Abortion of Cattle, Sheep and Goats
[VOL. XVIII, PART III
as prevalent as early as 1872 and by 1938 Benzone [1936] claims that, next to Malta, Italy is the most
infected country in the world. At this time, the fever had become common even in the extreme
north-western province of Piedmont, adjacent to the French frontier. Again the disease had been
recognized in the Iberian peninsula as far back as 1759. France, therefore, has been threatened
along two landward approaches and it is significant that during the decade of the thirties, the two
main endemic areas of that country were along the marches of the Pyrenees and a deep area lying
vis-a-vis the Piedmont frontier. [Taylor, Lisbonne, Vidal and Hazeman 1938.] In 1938, these
two endemic zones had not quite become confluent in the department of Aude on the gulf of Lyons.
Moreover, the remoter sheep-populated departments of Eure et Loire and Seine et Marne and the
western goat-populated department of Deux et Sevres have hitherto been disease-free. The infection
has, however, spread along the Franco-Swiss frontier, or more probably through Switzerland itself,
into the goat-breeding departments of Meuse, Moselle, Rhin and Vosges and so, into south-western
Germany. Eyre [1936] defined the limit of its spread at the 46th parallel of latitude N., but by
this date or a little later, the 50th parallel had almost been reached.
It has been suggested that infection was carried from the Mediterranean region to the new world
via the milk goats of the conquistadores. On the Mediterranean littoral itself, other places known
to be infected are Greece, Asia Minor, Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia, Palestine and Egypt, whilst further
south some infection is probable in Transjordania, Erytrea, Tanganyika, Iran, Iraq, Aden, Somali-
land and possibly the Cape (Fig. 13). Melitensis infection has also been described as far east as
Singapore and Manchuria. It is evident, therefore, that in certain circumstances this disease can
disseminate with ease, and it would be indeed extraordinary had not infection in some way penetrated
into India.
From the year of Wright's and Semple's [1897] demonstration of the agglutination test for
Brucellosis up to the time of the famous revelations of the Mediterranean Fever Commission [1905-07],
report after report was published of undulant fever in this country. A crescendo was reached in
1907 and then very little more was heard of human infection in India.
It is remarkable that, with the crude facilities and technique of those times, officers were apparent-
ly able to isolate Br. melitensis with ease and certainty wherever they tried, viz., from 11 humans
in Multan and Ferozepore [Lamb ; 1906] and from goats again in Ferozepore [Forster ; 1906] and
that numerous positive and typical cases were described from all over India. Indeed, a perusal of
the journals of that era must have forced contemporary readers to assume that melitensis fever was
endemic in certain military cantonments with the inference that the Punjab, at least, was widely
infested. Amongst the numerous places alleged to be infected were Ferozepore, Multan, Rawal-
pindi, Murree, Nowshera, Peshawar, and Mian Mir.
Furthermore, scrutiny of these records cannot fail to impress the critical reader with the fact
that a gram-negative, non-CO 2 sensitive, cocco-baccillus, which was agglutinated by Brucella specific
serum, was indeed being isolated from humans suffering from clinical undulant fever. Moreover,
that Co 2 was not required to isolate these strains is reasonable proof that they were the variant
melitensis. On the other hand, agglutination reactions were, on the whole, weak and a demonstration
of infection in animals was infrequent and applied to a few cantonment-goats only.
From 1907 onwards, the spate of case reports suddenly subsides until at the present day it is
difficult to obtain more than very rare reports of single cases of undulant fever in humans in India.
But this surprising state of affairs can only be explained by one of three propositions, viz., (1) that
the earlier reports were wholly incorrect (2) that in the period 1907-1939 human Brucellosis in India
has p actically died out, or (3) that undulant fever still occurs frequently and it is either not reported,
or not diagnosed.
The earlier work must either be disbelieved as a whole, thus discrediting the work of several
specialist officers, or accepted as a whole ; whilst at the present time, it is past belief that, frequent
cases of so serious a disease as melitensis infection, could be missed in modern army hospitals. In
the face of this, explanation must be sought in the rather improbable proposition 2.