Word: mohler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Iowa, farmers refused the tests. They argued: If a cow eats garlic, it shows up within half an hour in the cow's milk; surely the tuberculin injection would contaminate the milk. John Mohler pleaded the logic of science, finally won out. He ran 232,000,000 tests, slaughtered 3,800,000 tuberculous cows...
Rifles and Quicklime. John Mohler's most dramatic battles were fought against foot-& -mouth disease. When a tuberculous cow is dead, the chief danger of spreading TB is past. Not so with foot-& -mouth disease, which is caused by a nonfilterable virus carried from place to place by cattle or humans, by flying crows, by a piece of barnyard straw wafted in the wind...
...great U.S. foot-&-mouth epidemics, in 1914 and 1924, made John Mohler a hated man among many U.S. farmers. A man of stubborn faith, he argued that the only way to get rid of an epidemic is to stamp it out. When farmers came to hear his case, he first made them bathe their feet in disinfectant. His doctor's tools were trench-digging machines and rifles, crowbars and pickaxes, vats of formaldehyde and carloads of quicklime. His white-suited crews moved across the country, singling out the infected herds. Wherever there was a cow with ropy spittle, dollar...
Cattlemen protested, got out their rifles again, but to no avail. John Mohler moved ruthlessly on, stamping out every trace of the disease. It spread to the mountains of California, where no graves could be dug. John Mohler herded the cattle into canyons, blasted rock from the hillsides to cover their carcasses. It spread to deer in the Stanislaus National Forest. For twelve months, John Mohler's patient men stalked the forest, using rifles with silencers to avoid scattering the deer, killed every member of a herd of 22,000. In the two epidemics, 280,000 cattle, swine, sheep...
Medical Historian Paul de Kruif called it a "grand shambles of an experiment," remarked that it unquestionably accomplished "the greatest good for the greatest number." Foot-&-mouth disease has scourged Europe for centuries; in the U.S. it is now nonexistent, thanks to John Mohler, who rocked comfortably on his Washington porch this week, unmedaled, unsung and content...