Food Supplies and Animal Diseases

M. R. CLARKSON.

A FEW FACTS tell the importance of the food we get from animals.

To supply an average American family of four, farmers produce almost 3 tons of food a year. More than half of it is meat, eggs, poultry, and dairy products. Of those animal foods, we ate 25 percent more in 1956 than we did in 1935. American farms produce a third of the world's recorded yearly total of 80 billion pounds of red meat and a fourth of the 500 billion pounds of milk.

A look at the experience of other countries demonstrates further the importance of meat in the diet and the need to keep animals healthy.

Food supplies in most of the world cannot be taken for granted. Perhaps half of the world's people exist on diets that are nutritionally poor. Several hundred million, notably the people in countries where animal parasites run rampant and epizootics flare up repeatedly, are half-starved.

Every year brings additional evidence of how extensive is protein malnutrition in the world. Where it is most serious, as in tropical and sub- tropical part's of Africa, a livestock industry is almost nonexistent, and shortages Of meat, milk, eggs, and other livestock products are acute. The average person usually has less meat in an entire year than most Americans eat in a week. Milk is not tasted after infancy. Several forms of malignant malnutrition are prevalent as a result.

An effective treatment for kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition common among infants and young children in those areas, is cow's milk, especially skim milk, according to a study made in 1950 for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Yet an adequate livestock industry is difficult to maintain. The numerous efforts by various governments to produce breeds adapted to the climate, develop pasturage, and provide water have not given justifiable hope that a marked improvement in livestock production can be expected as long as animal diseases remain unchecked.

So it has been throughout history. Men always have been plagued and driven by animal diseases and sometimes destroyed by them. Their agriculture has suffered; they themselves have become victims of the 80 diseases that can be transmitted from animals to man.

Anthrax, for example, was described in ancient and Biblical literature and is thought to have been the fifth plague of Egypt, believed to have occurred about 1451 B. C. Violent outbreaks were recorded in Rome, Spain, and Greece between 800 and 500 B. C.

While the Black Death Was killing many people in Europe in 1348-1349, a plague probably rinderpest was attacking their cattle, which perished by the thousands. A great rise in food prices followed, despite an abundant harvest of cereals.

Disease in 1863 nearly exterminated the horned stock of Egypt, paralyzed farm operations, and deprived thousands of people of basic necessities.

Early wars (and the later ones, too) spread disease among the livestock and people wherever the armies went.

When Charlemagne led his army against the Danes in A. D. 810, he was followed back into France by plagues that created great havoc. The repeated raids by Mongols and Huns over several centuries established rinderpest in Russia. The Napoleonic Wars steadily built up the incidence of animal diseases in Europe to a culmination of ravages between 1812 to 1815. Diseases continued to flare and took an average of 10 to 25 percent of all the cattle in Belgium and Holland each year for the next 50 to 60 years. Rinderpest marched through Russia and into Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Greece during the First World War. It caused enormous losses of livestock and had a part in the postwar Russian famine that cost thousands of lives.

WHEN HEAVY LOSSES in cattle and water buffalo occurred during the Second World War, farmers had to abandon many acres of croplands in the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and Malaya, where those animals are used to till crops. Severe shortages of food resulted.

Not long ago the loss of one water buffalo brought starvation to a provincial Asian village because it meant failure of the rice crop. Cattle and buffalo still mean meat, milk, transportation, farm power, and in many lands manure for the soil. Keeping them free of disease, therefore, can help insure a better nutrition and a better health for hundreds of millions of people.

Enzootic animal diseases bar the full use of several areas in the world that otherwise are well suited to production of livestock. If rinderpest could be conquered in the great grazing areas of northern Africa, they could become great meat-producing lands. If African swine disease could be conquered in coastal Africa, hog production could become a reality. Better control of cattle diseases in several areas in Asia could increase milk production by about a third without adding a single animal. If mastitis could be driven out of dairy herds in Europe, milk production could be increased by more than 5 million tons a year.

OUR OWN LAND also provides examples of the harm outbreaks of animal disease can bring. No cattle, domestic sheep, or horses existed on this continent when Europeans first arrived; they were brought in. Yet fossil remains indicate that at one time horses and cattle roamed about. We do not know what caused them to vanish, but the possibility that diseases exterminated them is given some support by fossil traces of insects, including the tsetse fly. The tsetse fly is not found here now, but where it does occur, as in some parts of Africa, livestock production is almost impossible because of nagana, a devastating disease it spreads among cattle.

Establishing livestock in North America was a slow process. The early arrivals did not bring cattle and sheep with them, but poor nutrition and high death rates, especially among the children, led to laws that settlers must bring livestock. Later pioneers who journeyed westward from the Atlantic coast as a matter of course took 2 or 3 cattle to each wagon: Livestock production was started, and it expanded with the country.

Up to that point there was little evidence of widespread outbreaks of livestock diseases. The outbreaks that did occur apparently were of local significance. As long as the wide spaces remained open, stockmen could keep moving and escape disease. But as the country filled up, the practice became no defense at all.

The Civil War demonstrated how widely the effects of a local condition could spread. When Union forces secured the Mississippi, cattle of the Southwest were shut off from markets.

Afterward, when the roads opened, the great herds were driven north to Nebraska and Iowa and east .to Pennsylvania. They spread a plague of cattle tick fever. Other diseases also got beyond control, notably contagious pleuropneumonia in cattle and cholera in hogs.

State and Federal measures were developed gradually to combat the diseases. Today this Nation is one of the safest in all the world in which to raise stock.

But diseases, parasites, and insects still exact a heavy tribute. Each year 10 percent of all farm animals can be expected to die from disease or parasitism. Even greater economic losses come from diseases that do not necessarily kill but debilitate or maim the animals and otherwise interfere with efficient production.

To reduce those losses is a growing challenge. Ours is a relatively efficient livestock industry, compared to many other areas of the world. The cow's ability to convert into food for people the materials that man cannot eat has been enhanced by advances in breeding, feeding, and management. We have many more cattle, sheep, hogs, and goats in this country than people. We devote perhaps 70 out of every 100 acres in farms to growing forages and feed grains. Almost all economically usable rural lands not in farms also are Providing grazing or hay.