THE CATTLE PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 339, 8 January 1866, Page 1

THE CATTLE PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.

(From the Australasian.) At the last advices the west of Europe was trembling before a double plague, which imperilled the lives both of man and beast* Both the one and the other come from the lands of the rising sun. The East is the cradle of diseases more terrible than war, ami cholera —grim sister of the plague and the typhus —has been raging in its cities for months. By this time, however, its character is better understood than in 1832 and 1849, and the precautions are more effectual. It is moving on England, and has reached Hamburg, but in abated strength ; and in Egypt and Constantinople is dying out. It

is otlimvise with the “ kinder pest,” the cattle plague, to which, for want of u better, we give its German name. While the men, wo-liK-n, and children at home are only dreading wlmt umy possibly be, the Unfortunate fixen anil ows have their pestilence in reality. Breaking out first, it appears, at Norwich, fmm an importation of Russian cattle via Riga and Hamburg, it has spread north, south, and west, and is simultaneously reported as ravaging Wiltshire, Devonshire, Surrey. Berkshire, Sussex, Lincolnshire, ami Northumberland. In Scotland it had as yet nude little way ; ami in Ireland, where the agitation was extreme, the people were petitioning the Government for a sanitary quarantine, as the only preventative. There is but little use in discussing the causes which have led to the introduction of this malady into England. There it is, and the business is to get rid of it. .Its birth-place is well-ascertained. In the great steppes of Asia—hot as Africa in summer, and cold in winter as the arctic circle—it regularly breaks out every few years. Unless the Russians manage to stop it at the outset, it passes through Russia westwards, till it is only arrested by the seas. The dates of many of these kimler-pests ” are as well ascertained as the human plagues. It. is chronicled in the fourth century, in the e’ghth, in tlie ninth, the thirteenth, and the seventeenth. In Queen Anne’s time the contagion slew 1,500,000 oxen. In 1770 Holland lost in one year 375,000 head. Between 1713 and 1796 France and Belgium are computed to have lost by it ten millions of beasts. Nothing seems to stop it but the immediate slaughter and burial of the animals, (fur even the hide will convey the infection), and the complete isolation of the frontier. In this respect in olden times the straits of Dover, the English Channel, and the North Sea formed a powerful liue of defence for Great Britain. This line is now utterly destroyed, since for the last twenty years John Bull has been mainly fed on foreign beef. Steamers by the fifties pour into Loudon, Hull, and Leith the cattle of Belgium, Holland, Hanover, and Holstein. By the great railway lines converging at Hamburg, the Russian beasts are brought down in armies, and inundate the British markets It is thus with our unlucky friends at home a question of suspected beef or no beef at all. But the danger does not stop with the beef. The disease not show itself at once. A cow thoroughly inoculated with the virus will still go on secreting milk, and such milk once imbibed produces peculiar diseases of the worst trosciipiion.