Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
In addition, this page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Disinfection
The contagious matters are all kinds of cattle of the ox tribe, and also hides, hair, horns, and hoofs of those killed or dead with the plague.
The intestinal discharges are the principal agents that spread the disorder.
Hence all articles that have been in contact with a diseased animal or any of its discharges, are capable of carrying the infection for an indefinite time, as racks of wood, or iron cribs, or mangers of wood, iron, or stone; collars, straps, ropes, chains, harness, carts, wagons, or carriages, which they have touched; gutters or drains in which their urine has flowed; all implements for removing manure; the manure heap; the ground on which they have stood; paths and roads on which diseased cattle have walked or been drawn, etc., etc.; - to all and any of which, disinfectants must be applied.
Burying deeply in dry ground is the quickest, cheapest, and most certain way of disinfecting an animal dead from the plague.
The droppings, straw, and all other matters contaminated should also be buried, so that they cannot be disturbed for a long time.
Manure heaps and down-trodden manure of cattle yards, if infected by even a small quantity of the droppings of a diseased animal, should be removed to a suitable place, and covered with a layer of earth.
Floors of any shed or stable in which diseased cattle have stood, if not formed of water-tight and impenetrable material, must be assumed to be infected to the depth of six inches. Half rotten wood is an especially favorable carrier of infection. Any lining of a pen where a diseased animal has stood, should be broken out and burned.
All infected articles, as racks of wood or iron, etc., can be disinfected by exposing them to a heat which will char wood, and all such of iron should then be galvanized.
Chloride of Lime is among the cheapest and most powerful of artificial disinfectants, and should be applied as much as possible in solution.
It is not applicable to large quantities of manure, or to matters rich in ammonia, as putrid urine. - One pound of chloride of lime to one gallon of water can be distributed by a garden engine, or by a watering-pot, after a thorough scrubbing and scraping of stalls, etc. All brooms and other implements, or persons stepping from a dirty or partially cleaned place to a clean one, may suffice to bring back infection. Workmen must also be careful to wash their own bodies and hair with crucible is set in hot ashes, and a piece of stick sulphur of the size of a man's thumb dropped into it. The sulphurous acid gas thus generated is sufficient to fumigate thoroughly a large cattle-shed in about twenty minutes. The process which, by the way, the cattle are said to like, must be repeated four or five times a day, and the disease is soon got under. January 28, 1867. - We have just received the pamphlet alluded to, and find this foot-note to contain the essence of the information. -