Foot-&-Mouth Vaccine?

At Buenos Aires last week Dr. Jose Lignieres, French bacteriologist who has worked in the Argentine for the past 30 years, told Argentina's President Hipolito Irigoyen he was certain that he had developed a vaccine against foot-&-mouth disease.

Foot-&-mouth disease is an acute, highly communicable disease, chiefly of cloven-footed animals. Domestic animals suffer from it more frequently than do wild ones. Besides beeves it sometimes afflicts sheep, goats, hogs, horses, dogs, cats, camels, buffalo, bison, antelope, chamois, llama, giraffe. Man, especially children, catch the disease from infected animals by ingesting unpasteurized milk, butter, buttermilk, cheese or whey. In man the disease is usually mild.

Sick animals go lame. They also slobber at the mouth and smack their lips as though trying to get rid of something. The mouth is sore from the characteristic lesions of the disease. When animals are infected they must be killed and their bodies destroyed by fire or quicklime, else buried deeply, to prevent the disease spreading to other animals. Because of such thorough eradication the U. S., which has had several epidemics of foot-&-mouth disease, now has practically no cases. In the Argentine the disease still prevails. That is one good reason for preventing the importation of Argentine meat into the U. S.

Cause of the disease is a virus so small that the most powerful microscopes cannot reveal it. It can pass through the very finest porcelain filter and still infect animals. In pathology this virus has special interest. It was the first ultramicroscopic, filterable virus discovered (1898), and gave a clue to many mysterious causes of disease. As to just what such viruses are, bacteriologists are not unanimous. They may be a kind of germ; they may be a kind of chemical.

That is why Dr. Lignieres went directly to President Irigoyen with his last week's announcement. If he had a vaccine, it was of vast import to medicine. It might prelude vaccines for other virus diseases. To the International Congress on Veterinarian Medicine in London this August goes Dr. Lignieres for confirmation of his work.

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