56
Pleuropneumonia in Goats
from the Anatolian outbreaks. Both are indol-positive and both fail to
ferment lactose. Regarding the infectivity of the organisms, the noticeable
point of difference is that the cultures of B. bipolaris caprisepticus are fatal
to goats by all the routes except the intratracheal one, whereas the organism
described in this paper can infect goats, sheep and buffalo calves by every
route of inoculation, the intratracheal one being the route of choice for all
experimental infections described in this paper. This is one of the unique
features of the organism, and in this respect it resembles the type of pasteu-
rella isolated by Dungal [1931] from cases of enzootic pneumonia in Icelandic
sheep. Cultural examinations of blood at all stages of the disease have
yielded negative results and inoculations of blood of experimentally affected
goats to healthy ones have failed to reproduce the disease. This is in con¬
firmity with the results obtained by Kolayli et al. [1935] in goats and by Jones
and Little [1921] in cows.
Although the morphological and cultural characters of pasteurella of
varying origin, and the pathological processes caused by them agree with one
another on broad grounds, there exist, however, certain differences among
them which admit the existence of different types in the pasteurella group as a
whole. Thus, although the origanisms isolated from sheep pneumonia by
Dungal [1931] in Iceland, and by Montgomerie, Bosworth and Glover [1938]
in Wales, agree in general characters, they differ markedly in their patho¬
genecity to sheep. They are indol-negative and in this respect they differ
from the type isolated by Newsom and Cross [1923] from ovine pneumonia,
which is indol-positive. Jones and Little [1921] isolated several types of
pasteurella from calves affected with pneumonia, some of which differ from
classical organisms. They divided their strains into three groups, namely I,
II and III respectively. Groups I and II were encapsulated and were of low
virulence for rabbits and mice. Group III, which was pathogenic for rabbits,
was regarded as belonging to the haemorrhagic septicaemia class. Pasteurel-
losis is a widely prevalent disease amongst cattle and buffaloes in India, but as
far as sheep and goats are concerned, the number of recorded observations
appears to be scanty. A recent description of pasteurellosis in sheep and
goats by Naik [1938] in Bombay Presidency does not include pleuro-pneu-
monia as a clinical or post-mortem feature. The bacteria isolated from goats
in Anatolia and in this country, however, have a marked resemblance to Jones'
group III. Both ferment dextrose, saccharose and mannitol, but not lactose
and salicin. Both are indol-positive and both do not cause haemolysis on
blood-agar media. Both the goat strains are non-capsulated and in this
character they resemble some of the strains in Jones' group III. There is a
difference in the action on maltose since Jones' strains failed to affect this
sugar, whereas both the goat strains fermented it.
The unique features of the outbreaks investigated by the author are that
the simple contact of healthy goats with the affected animals could re-
produce the disease in the former, and the feeding of infective lung materials
and cultures of the organism was equally effective in setting up the disease in
experimental goats. The virulent organism of the natural cases of the disease,
if present in large numbers in excretions of diseased animals, could easily
infect contact animals of normal resistance. This point has been discussed in