In stables where glanders exists, in some cases, all the horses are tested and divided; the reactors are separated from the non-reactors, and those that react are tested once a month until they cease to react, or show physical indications of glanders and are killed. Used in this way mallein seems to have a curative effect on incipient cases, and has been very successfully used in freeing infected stables from the disease. When a horse is killed because it has glanders or farcy the stall should be thoroughly disinfected where it has been kept, as well as the harness, blankets, currycomb and other utensils, and anything that cannot be easily disinfected ought to be destroyed. Public watering troughs where the horse has been watered should be emptied and cleaned out, and the blacksmith ought to disinfect his shop where the horse was shod.
There are various diseases that may be taken for glanders or farcy, and there have also been numerous instances where glanders has been taken for something else; for instance, chronic nasal catarrh. What many old-time veterinarians used to call chronic nasal catarrh or nasal gleet, were, in many instances, if not in nearly all, cases of chronic glanders, and when one of these cases of nasal gleet was rounded up in a locality, glanders disappeared in that neighborhood.
A horse with a chronic discharge from the nose as the result of a decayed tooth may sometimes be mistaken for a case of glanders, and also a horse with distemper or strangles; but the latter generally recovers soon, and in strangles the gland under the jaw softens and breaks and discharges while in glanders the gland remains firm and hard and generally not sensitive to manipulation.
There is a disease that has been troublesome in Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio the last two years called suppurative lymphangitis or epizootic lymphangitis, which may be mistaken for farcy, but animals suffering from it do not react to mallein, and guinea pigs inoculated with the discharges do not develop glanders. There is not much glanders in the Eastern states, except in the cities, and the disease is not of a great deal of interest to farmers, except to avoid purchasing animals with it at some of the unreliable sales stables. Where a case occurs on a farm, except on some market gardener’s farm near a city, it is found, as a rule, that the horse was purchased at some unscrupulous dealer’s stable in the city, and, in some instances, other horses on the farm are infected, and the farmer not only loses his new acquisition, but has two or three other horses killed besides that have become infected.