FACIAL ECZEMA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 December 1938, Page 7

FACIAL ECZEMA

TEAM OF INVESTIGATORS HARD AT WORK NO CONTAMINATION OF MEAT. ASSURANCE BY MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. An assurance that as soon as any definite results were available regarding the Government’s investigations into facial eczema that they would be made available for the guidance of the farming community generally was given by the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon W. Lee Martin, in an interview last » evening. He said the Government had allocated a large sum for implementing the most comprehensive single investigation ever carried out in New Zealand into a live stock disease. A large team of scientific workers with the co-operation of members of the farming community was working on the problem of so-called facial eczema in stock. “I have observed reports to the effect that the recent outbreak of the disease in the stock was contagious, contaminating meat sold for human consumption,” said the Minister. “This belief has no foundation in fact, as all authorities in countries where the disease has been studied are agreed that it is not contagious. Experiments conducted in the Dominion and other countries have proved conclusively that the disease is not transmissable from ’• animal to animal, nor from animal to the human being. “In order to avoid the possibility of affected meat being placed on the local or export market, the department meat inspectors stationed at all freezing works and abattoirs were instructed to carry out a most rigid inspection of carcases and the success of this inspection can be gauged when it was shown that not a single complaint has been received of affected meat being offered for sale to the public.” The Minister said it was unfortunate that the complaint was referred to as “facial eczema,” as it was not the usual skin disease of that name, but appeared to be the culminating feature of a nutritional disturbance. The term facial eczema had been used over many years and was a misnomer. As a result it has misled some of the public and members of the farming community in the belief that the disease was contagious. “I wish to emphasise,” said the Minister, “that this disease of stock described as facial eczema is definitely non-infectious and non-contagious.”