EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON AVIAN DIPHTHERIA

Abstract

Although avian diphtheria has long been recognized as an epizootic disease among chickens, and several investigations made by numerous workers in foreign countries since 1873 have been reported, our knowledge of the causal agent is still far from complete. This disease has also become yearly more widespread in this conntry and attention has been directed to it chiefly through the work of investigators rather than by the losses it has occasioned. In 1907, Carnwath concluded from his experimental work that the causal agent of this disease was identical with the virus of chicken pox, since which we have had no other noteworthy information concerning this disease. I have studied, in the first