A serious disease occurring in sheep and cattle, and in those who tend them or handle the bones, skins and fleeces – even long after removal of the latter from the animals. It is sometimes referred to as malignant pustule, wool-sorters’ disease, splenic fever of animals, or murrain. It is now a rare condition in the United Kingdom. The cause is a bacillus (B. anthracis) which grows in long chains and produces spores which retain their life for years, in dried skins and fleeces; they are not destroyed by boiling, freezing, 5 per cent carbolic lotion, or, like many bacilli, by the gastric juice. The disease is communicated from a diseased animal to a crack in the skin (e.g. of a farmer or butcher), or from contact with contaminated skins or fleeces. Nowadays skins are handled wet, but if they are allowed to dry so that dust laden with spores is inhaled by the workers, serious pneumonia may result.
Prevention is most important by disinfecting all hides, wool and hair coming from affected areas of the world. An efficient vaccine is now available. Treatment consists of the administration of large doses of the broad-spectrum antibiotic, CIPROFLOXACIN. If bioterrorism is thought to be the likely source of anthrax infection, appropriate decontamination procedures must be organised promptly.
This is the ‘malignant pustule’. After inoculation of some small wound, a few hours or days elapse, and then a red, inflamed swelling appears, which grows steadily larger. Upon its summit appears a bleb of pus, which bursts and leaves a black scab, perhaps 12 mm (half an inch) wide. The patient is feverish and seriously ill. The inflammation may last ten days or so, when it slowly subsides and the patient recovers, if surviving the fever and prostration.
This takes the form of pneumonia with haemorrhages, when the spores have been drawn into the lungs, or of ulcers of the stomach and intestines, with gangrene of the SPLEEN, when they have been swallowed. It is usually fatal in two or three days. Victims may also develop GASTROENTERITIS or MENINGITIS.