RESEARCH INTO CONTAGIOUS ABORTION OF CATTLE, SHEEP, AND
GOATS*
BRUCELLOSIS IN INDIA
By JOHN B. POLDING
(Received for publication on 6 June 1947)
INTRODUCTION
THE scheme for the investigation of contagious abortion in the cattle, sheep and goats of India has
occupied a period of five years, involved a considerable monetary expenditure and entailed some
25 thousand miles of travel, in persuing an enquiry throughout a subcontinent. Consequently,
to avoid costly repetition and to preserve hardly won information, it seems that the results should
be recorded as a single consecutive entity. In compiling this report, therefore, an attempt has been
made to give a comprehensive, but concise, exposition of all that has been learnt during the scheme.
Further, although some of the work has been partially or wholly described elsewhere—in annual
reports or articles—nothing has been omitted on that account, which would detract from the con-
tinuity or completeness of the narrative. Finally, for the convenience of future workers, a record
of standard laboratory methods, experimental details and standing technical instructions has been
interpolated in small print.
The scheme has not primarily been one of pure research, but was chiefly intended to bring the
problems of Brucellosis in India into line with similar problems overseas; the work has, therefore,
been mainly a collecting of material and a collation of information, which resulted in examinations,
classifications, and comparisons, in their turn inevitably leading to conjecture. It is regrettable
that owing to a paucity of funds for pure research and a shortness of time, conjecture could not
always be tested by planned experiment; nevertheless, where suppositions seem usefully to point
the way, they have not been excluded from this paper.
The period of the scheme was utilized thus. The first year was devoted to the collection of
apparatus, the training of staff, the examining of old records and to general preliminary organiza-
tion. The next three years were almost entirely occupied by survey work, although towards their
end elementary vaccination was being introduced. Into the last short year (May 31st, 1943 to
March 31st, 1944), was crowded most of the purely experimental work which arose out of the earlier
experience and, with so much to be done in so short a time, much of this endeavour has suffered from
baste and incompleteness.
To render a report dealing with a peculiar environment concise enough to please the local reader
and at the same time to introduce enough local colour to make the matter intelligible to overseas
workers, is always an inenviable task; it is regretted, if the geographical and climatological details
of the resulting conspectus seem superfluous to the one, or insufficient to the other.
SECTION I. EPIDEMIOLOGY, THE OCCURRENCE OF BRUCELLOSIS IN INDIA
Mode of occurrence
BRUCELLOSIS in India, as in other countries, may take the form of (1) a primary epidemic (2) an
endemic and (3) an exacerbation of an endemic, amounting for a short period, to a secondary
epidemic. Primary epidemics, though fortunately comparatively rare, can be of considerable
severity and may produce an abortion rate of from 10 to 20 per cent of breeding stock in the course
of a few months; such mishaps, moreover, are usually followed by not easily eradicable endemics.
Conversely, endemics are exceedingly common in many Indian farms and villages and they usually
take the form of a small but unending trickle of abortions at a rate of 1 to 5 per cent loss of calves
* Final report of the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research Scheme on Contagious Abortion, 1939-1944.
115