Hog Cholera
also known as Swine Fever, a malady affecting hogs, of which the chief symptoms include excessive diarrhea, purple coloring of the skin, lack of appetite, general irritation and inactivity. The virus has been located and is filterable, and is usually conveyed by the water supply. The seat of the disease is in the lungs and intestines and there is much inflammation. The percentage of loss from this disease is very large.
There are different varieties of the disease, and two kindred maladies, hog cholera and swine plague, often set up a complication in the same hog. Physicians, however, have differentiated between the two, the former usually attacking the intestines, and the latter usually attacking the lungs. The principal symptom in hog cholera is in the discoloration of the skin; in the other the animal usually suffers from a continual cough. Very often the disease cannot be correctly diagnosed till after death, when the character is indicated by the lesions in the lungs, the intestinal canal or abdominal lymph glands.
The disease is contagious and the methods of counteracting it when it affects a herd have to be drastic. The affected hogs have to be segregated, and the pens and surroundings in which they have been confined have to be burnt.
Even the ground has to be put into disuse, and the bacilli must be destroyed by putting it into a state of cultivation if it is intended again to use it as a hog yard. The water has to be carefully examined, and the pens kept clean and occasionally whitewashed.
Just as there are varieties in the malady so there are degrees in its virulence. In serious cases the hog may die at the end of a couple of days. In a less serious case the animal may continue sick for a period of about five weeks. Hogs have been successfully immunized. The most successful method has been to inject the immune serum into one side and blood from a hog sick with the malady into the other. Tonics containing sodium salts and sulphur have also had good effects.
HOGEN-MOGEN (hōg'en-mōg'en), a sobriquet for Holland, a corruption of Hooge en Mogendé ("High and Mighty"), the Dutch term of address to their States- General.