Twice A Week Plain Dealer

Tuberculosis—Man and Beast.
To The Gazette.—You published last summer an account of my appearance before the Special Investigating committee on Tuberculosis appointed from the New York Assembly by Governor Roosevelt, and you also published the paper I read before that Committee, giving views entirely at variance with the generally accepted idea that tuberculosis of cattle could be communicated to the human subject.

I advised the committee to investigate especially this all-important subject, because the question of how to deal with bovine tuberculosis depends upon the solution of this problem. I told the Committee that thus far the money and efforts already spent to eradicate the disease in cattle in this State had accomplished practically nothing, and other states that had not spent a dollar were just as well off as our own was. I predicted the members would discover that where cattle tuberculosis is common, human tuberculosis is so rare as to bear no relation to it; that when they found the thick of bovine tuberculosis they would find themselves practically outside the consumptive belt.

That Committee has been working on the subject for the past six months and have examined over sixty witnesses, more than half of whom were experts, among them men eminent in the several professions, biology, medicine and veterinary surgery, and they selected especially men who have given tuberculosis much study. The report states that "Evidence taken by the Committee would indicate that very rarely, if ever, does a person contract tuberculosis from meat or milk of animals. Thus every prediction I made to that Committee last August has been fulfilled, and the recommendation then made, that for the present it will only be necessary for the State to give cattle owners full information on the subject in order for them to work out their own salvation, has been seconded by the Committee when it says, "The evidence seems very abundant that the State can better use its funds along lines of educational work, rather than following the present policy of destroying all animals showing a reaction under the tuberculosis test."

EDWARD MOORE.