In a widespread outbreak, it is obviously better to protect valuable animals throughout the whole area affected than to spend time in protecting every animal in particular villages. The objection to leaving unprotected animals in a village where the serum-alone method has been used is that dangerous foci of disease remain which may undo the whole of the benefit conferred by temporarily protecting animals; but, when the valuable animals have all been permanently protected, subsequent outbreaks in the village need cause no alarm to those responsible for checking disease. Indeed, in Mysore, such subsequent outbreaks proved distinctly useful as they proved to cultivators whose cattle had been protected that they had been well advised to agree to the operation, and to owners who had refused to have their cattle inoculated that they had acted foolishly. INOCULATION. 243. Inoculation, not only against rinderpest but against other (vii) FEES FOR contagious diseases, is usually done without cost to the cultivator. Sometimes, however, a small charge is made as by some of the district boards in Bengal. In Bombay, where rinderpest serum is provided free, a charge of two annas is made for doses of other vaccines. It is the invariable experience that where charges, however small, are made for such preparations, their use is greatly checked and it was for this reason that the fee of Rs. 2 per head for inoculation by the serum-simultaneous method, which had been levied for some time in the Madras Presidency, was abolished from January 1st, 1926. We recommend that all fees for inoculation not only against rinderpest but also against other contagious diseases should be abolished. The revenue derived from them is very small compared with the expenditure, and they undoubtedly act as a grave deterrent to an extended use of preventive inoculation. We recognise that the widespread adoption of the serum-simultaneous method must involve an appreciable increase in expenditure if no charge is levied when it is used. For the cattle of the plains, the cost of the doses of serum and virus works out at about one rupee per head; but there is little doubt that, if the work were carried out systematically on a large scale, the cost could be greatly reduced, possibly to not more than half this sum. We shall return to this point in discussing the work of the Imperial Institute of Veterinary Research at Muktesar. INOCULATION. as 244. Whilst we do not think that, in present conditions, compulsory (viii) COMPULSORY inoculation is advisable in dealing with the cultivators' cattle, there is one class of cattle owner who should, in our opinion, be required to have his cattle permanently protected; we refer to milk sellers registered by municipalities. Wherever municipalities do not possess the legal power to prescribe the registration of milk sellers or to enforce immunisation, we think that power should be conferred. Recent experience in Madras where a large number of cross-bred European cattle are kept has shown the advisability of the course we have recommended. Milk sellers in that city are licensed and their cattle sheds, milk shops, etc., are inspected by officers of the Health Department, but it does not appear that the maintenance in health of dairy cattle has engaged attention, as no veterinary surgeon is employed permanently MO Y 286-19 by the Corporation. Outbreaks of rinderpest are not common in Madras city; that which occurred in the latter half of 1926 was the third in twenty years and it is not surprising, in these circumstances, that milkmen should be unwilling to adopt serumsimultaneous inoculation which temporarily arrests the flow of milk. The consequences of this unwillingness may, however, be serious as the following approximate figures for the recent outbreak will show : It will be seen that the disease in this case was not of a virulent type; the percentage of deaths among Indian cattle was very small, but that amongst the European cross-breds was ten times as large. Our reasons for recommending compulsory inoculation for such cities as Madras are two. The city population must be protected from a sudden and serious curtailment of the milk supply and the cultivator must be protected from the spread of disease through the susceptible cross-bred cows kept by licensed milkmen. Licensed milkmen, purchasing a cow in-calf, should be compelled to have it protected shortly after it has calved. They should similarly be compelled to protect cows in milk as soon as bought. It would be necessary for the municipality to provide an isolation hospital for inoculated animals as they would constitute a danger to other animals if they were kept in the ordinary cowsheds. 245. Rinderpest, although the most important, is only one of the serious infectious diseases to which Indian livestock (ix) CONCLUSION. are liable. In discussing the measures which should be undertaken to deal with it, sufficient has been said to show that the suppression of epidemics must make large demands on the professional skill, the energy and the judgment of the officers in charge of the operations, and that the type of education which such officers should possess is of a different order from that necessary for officers competent to deal with the diseases and injuries that come within ordinary veterinary dispensary practice. It will also be evident that to cope successfully with epidemic diseases, the number of officers employed by provincial governments must be largely increased. Before we formulate our proposals under these heads, it will be convenient if we discuss the question of legislation against disease and describe the present position in regard to veterinary aid. 246. If the policy we outline in this chapter is accepted, we are LEGISLATION confident that a great reduction can be effected in the immense losses now caused to cultivators and to the public as a whole by the ravages of disease. No staff, however large and however skilled, can be fully effective unless Government have the power to control the spread of infection by veterinary police AGAINST DISEASE. measures. We recognise that such measures present much greater difficulty in India than in the countries in which they are now commonly adopted and it is partly for this reason that we lay such emphasis on the training of officers for the superior veterinary services. Conditions in India call for initiative, judgment, tact and high professional skill in a far greater degree than they do in countries in which rigorous police measures are possible. But it would be fair neither to the veterinary departments nor to the tax-paying public, which is called upon to contribute large sums for the suppression of disease, if no attempts. were made to give this work such aid as it is possible to give it by legislation. More attention to the question of controlling disease appears to have been given in Madras than in any other province. A Cattle Diseases Act was passed in that presidency as early as 1866 and is still in operation. Under the powers conferred by this Act, the notification of certain diseases has been made compulsory; movements within the presidency can be regulated; "standstill " orders, for example, can be made should disease break out during cattle fairs; and the carcases of animals which have died of discase can be destroyed. But, though the powers conferred by the Act are extensive, their effects are very limited owing to the difficulty of applying them effectively. Some sections of the Act have, however, served a useful purpose. When, for instance, a rinderpest outbreak is being dealt with, inoculation with anti-rinderpest serum is made compulsory and, where cultivators have objected, a few prosecutions have resulted in inoculation being carried out with little difficulty. In Burma, the Cattle Disease Rules of 1914 which apply to all areas in which the Burma Village Act, 1907, is in force enable outbreaks of disease to be dealt with on much the same lines as in Madras, with the important exception that inoculation cannot be made compulsory. The difficulties which have been encountered in enforcing legislation for the control of cattle disease in Madras have also been encountered in Burma. There are obvious objections to enactments the provisions of which cannot be strictly enforced and we should have hesitated to make any recommendations on this point were we not convinced that the advantages of legislation greatly outweigh these objections. Under the Devolution Rules, legislation in respect of animal diseases is a central subject to such an extent as may be declared by any Act of the Indian Legislature. We recommend that a Contagious Diseases of Animals Act should be passed for the whole of British India so that a uniform procedure may be possible throughout the country. The Act should empower local governments to apply by administrative order to any tract such of its provisions as may be applicable in the circumstances of the case. The Act should be sufficiently comprehensive to ensure that all the powers likely to be required in dealing with any disease may be legalised and, following the usual lines of such legislation, should deal with the action required of provincial governments and district boards or other MO Y 286-19a local authorities and their officers, the reporting of disease, the isolation of infected animals and of animals which have been in contact with them, the disposal of the carcases of diseased animals and of other infective material, disinfection, the closure of markets and fairs, the regulation of movement and the compulsory inoculation of animals which have been in contact with infected animals. A list of the diseases to which the Act applies should be given in a schedule appended to it and model rules should be drawn up by a committee, on which the veterinary departments should be adequately represented. These rules should be published by the Government of India. If legislation of this character were enacted, it would be possible for officers dealing with an outbreak to determine which of the powers conferred by it could usefully be applied in a particular ease, and to move the provincial governments to take suitable action. The existence of model rules would make it unlikely that there would be any departure from them without good cause, and thus, whilst the elasticity necessary to meet local conditions would exist, the general procedure throughout India would tend to be the same. In the United States, where the position is somewhat similar to that in India, the individual States are responsible for the enforcement, within their own territories, of regulations for the control of livestock diseases, but, in the event of an outbreak of contagious disease, the Federal Government adopts the measures required to prevent it from spreading beyond the boundaries of the States affected. If uniformity of action in dealing with the various contagious diseases is adopted by the provincial veterinary departments, we do not consider it necessary at this stage that the Government of India should follow the example of the Federal Government. The present position in respect of the prevalence of epidemic disease is very different in the two countries. If, as we trust will prove the case, an outbreak of a dangerous disease eventually becomes as rare an occurrence in India as, for example, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease is now in the United States, the intervention of the central Government may be essential; but this period is still so distant that the measures likely to be called for when it arrives need not now be discussed. A more immediate problem is presented by the Indian States. The mutual benefit to be derived from a united effort to check the spread of disease is so great that we are hopeful that Indian States will be prepared to copy the legislation enacted by the Government of India and to adopt the model rules drawn up for use in British India. It is in this hope that we suggest, in paragraph 258, that provision should be made for the training of students from those States at the college selected for the training of candidates for the provincial veterinary services in British India, and, in paragraph 263, that the States should be treated in exactly the same way as provincial governments in regard to the charges made for the products manufactured at Muktesar. Where small States employ veterinary assistant surgeons but are unable to employ fully qualified veterinary surgeons, it should be possible for them to arrange for the expert guidance necessary, either by obtaining the part-time services of an officer working in an adjoining British district, or by joining with other States to engage a veterinary surgeon who would supervise the work of their dispensaries and organise a staff to combat [outbreaks of disease. THE PRESENT POSI TION OF VETERINARY 247. In 1868, Lord Mayo, as Viceroy, appointed a Commission to report on cattle disease in India and the measures necessary for their prevention and cure. The report of the Commission included a recommendation for a Civil Veterinary Establishment. The Famine Commission of 1880 made no recommendations on this subject; it recommended, however, the constitution of an Agricultural Department, and the Secretary of State, in 1882, urged that this should give early and careful attention to the subject of cattle disease. In 1883, a commission recommended the formation of a Civil Veterinary Department, but want of funds prevented anything from being done. In 1886, the Government of India recommended to the Secretary of State the formation of a Civil Veterinary Department but it was not until until 1891 that such a department was formed. Apart from a few practitioners in the large towns, there are no veterinary surgeons in private practice in India. Veterinary aid is thus, except to a negligible extent, provided by officers employed either directly under Government or by local boards and a comparison of the number of these with the total cattle population reveals that there is only one of them to every hundred thousand cattle; but even this single practitioner cannot be regarded as a whole-time officer for cattle, as there are a number of other domestic animals requiring his aid. Moreover, of the officers employed, only one in fifteen can claim to be a qualified veterinary surgeon. The others have been trained only as veterinary assistant surgeons. For the whole of British India, there are in civil employ about 32 veterinary surgeons in the Indian Veterinary Service and 52 in the provincial veterinary services, whilst the number of veterinary inspectors and veterinary assistant surgeons in 1927 was about 1,400. A number of the superior staff are employed in teaching and other duties. Thus some 33 gazetted officers only are available for the control and treatment of disease, and, of this small corps, fewer than one half are licensed to practise veterinary medicine and surgery through possessing the diploma of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. These figures sufficiently show the inadequacy of the existing arrangements for controlling contagious diseases and attending to animals. suffering from ordinary ailments and from injuries. Many sick and wounded animals do, in fact, receive treatment of some kind from persons who have had no training in veterinary matters. Experience has taught the value of certain remedies and these may at times be used empirically with good effect; but there is much crude quackery and it is unlikely that animals gain as much as they lose from treatment by untrained men. The position, therefore, is that the effective treatment of the |