ABSTRACT
During the 1860s, while Pasteur studied fermentation, spontaneous generation, and silkworm diseases, other French scientists were becoming interested in an infectious disease known as anthrax.
Anthrax usually attacks livestock, and especially sheep, in wet or marshy areas. Infected animals occasionally drop dead without any signs of disease, but, more commonly, over the space of a few hours or days, afflicted animals become progressively weaker until they are unable to walk. In the final stages of the disease, dying animals simply lie on the ground, panting and hemorrhaging through all body openings; death comes by asphyxiation. Anthrax spreads rapidly among livestock – within a few days of the first fatalities, entire herds can be lost; it can also attack humans who handle meat or skins from infected animals. Among humans, anthrax usually occurs either as cutaneous boils (known as malignant pustules) or as a gastro-intestinal disorder. Anthrax is sometimes fatal to humans, but livestock are at much greater risk: in early nineteenth-century Europe, a few hundred people may have died of anthrax in a given year, but deaths among livestock often numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Obviously the disease had profound economic significance.
