Glanders: medicine and veterinary medicine in common pursuit of a contagious disease

Abstract

TODAY, GLANDERS is a disease rarely heard of in Western Europe, Britain, and North America; but a hundred years ago the annual total of cases of glanders in the horse, published by the Board of Agriculture, exceeded 2,000,1 and British veterinarians were all too familiar with the disease. Moreover, transmission to man took place with distressing regularity, and the outcome was nearly always fatal.2 In 1908, William Hunting, Chief Veterinary Inspector to the London County Council, wrote: "Glanders in man is such a loathsome and fatal disease as to deserve more attention than it receives. ... If the medical profession called for the suppression of glanders as loudly as they did for the extermination of rabies, prevention in all animals would be accelerated. Hydrophobia in man ceased when we had stamped out rabies in dogs, and glanders in man will only cease when the disease no longer exists among horses".3