Committee Reports > List of Committees > Dáil > 1940 > Committee of Public Accounts > Interim and Final Report - Appropriation Accounts 1938 - 1939

APPENDIX XII.

INQUIRY AS TO CONTROL BY CERTAIN DRUGS OF STREPTOCOCCAL INFECTIONS IN CATTLE.

The drugs referred to are most likely those of the Prontosil and Sulphanilamide groups, especially the latter. No work on the action of these drugs on mastitis in cattle has been carried out at our Laboratory. The Department have, however, kept in close touch with the current research on this head in other countries, especially Great Britain, America, Canada and the Continent. The results to date are somewhat conflicting, but it may be taken as correct that Sulphanilamide in large and repeated doses reduces the number of streptococci agalactiae (the common causal agent of bovine mastitis) with a corresponding improvement in the clinical condition of the udder which is often most striking, but complete permanent cure does not follow. Moreover, to obtain improvement of symptoms the dose must be large enough, and repeated at short intervals, to maintain a certain necessary concentration of the drug in the blood which makes the treatment so expensive as to be almost prohibitive at present for its general employment in ordinary dairy herds.

In the Department’s Veterinary Research Laboratory tests have been carried out to ascertain the effect of Sulphanilamide on cattle and small animals infected with Brucella abortus which is the common cause of bovine contagious abortion, and the results have been entirely negative.

Assist. Secretary, Department of Agriculture.

30 Mi na Samhna, 1939.