Abstract
WORK in Australia has shown that deficiency of cobalt in the diet is responsible for characteristic disorders of sheep and cattle. The view that a sheep disease known as ‘pining’ results from cobalt deficiency was advanced by Corner and Smith1, who claimed that cobalt administration prevented and cured this disease north of the Scottish border. In our opinion these experiments were inadequately controlled. During a large-scale investigation of ‘pining’ in the Cheviot area south of the border, undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Taylor and Dr. Green of the Veterinary Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture at Weybridge, a well-controlled experiment was carried out to test the curative effect of cobalt on sheep suffering in varying degree from this disease. Cobalt solution was administered for five months to one half of the sheep, the other half being left as untreated controls. The death-rate from ‘pining’ was as high in the treated as the untreated group, and at the end of the experiment the treated sheep were no better than the controls as judged by body-weight records and hæmatocrite estimations. The details of this experiment have been described in a recent number of the Veterinary Record.
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References
Corner and Smith, Biochem. J., 32, 1800 (1938).
Stewart and Ponsford, J. Comp. Path, and Ther., 49, 49 (1936).
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STEWART, W., PONSFORD, A. Pining in Sheep not Curable by Cobalt Administration. Nature 145, 1023 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/1451023a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1451023a0
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