Acute bracken (Pteridium aquilinum (L) Kuhn) poisoning of cattle in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Tokarnia, Carlos Hubinger
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Döbereiner, Jürgen, Canella, Camillo F. C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Pesquisa Agropecuária Brasileira (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.sct.embrapa.br/index.php/pab/article/view/17929

The authors describe a disease in cattle they studied in the States of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, characterized by high fever, hemorrhagic diathesis, erosions and ulcers in the nostrils and the mucous membranes of the digestive tract, anemia and death in one or several days. Most of the affected animals were less than two years old. The authors can not inform the morbility rate, because it appears that there are cases in which the symptams of the disease are very light. Animals badly affected almost always die. But there are cases of recovery among these. Histopathological findings were hemarrhages, ulcers, necrotic foci in liver, atrophy and necrobiotic changes of the germinative centers of the lymphoid follicles of the spleen and atrophy of the hematopoetic tissue in the bone marrow. Treatments with antibiotics and antitoxics were unsuccessful. The disease is only observed in animals that nave been on bracken fern infested fields for several weeks or months, and it occurs only during the winter months, from April to August. The authors diagnose this disease as acute bracken (P. aquilinum) poisoning. The diagnosis is based on the history of two disease, observation of breeding and feeding conditions on the farms, on clinical examinations, and in two outbreaks on postmortem examinations, histopathalogical findings and bacteriological proceedings. This study shows, that acute bracken poisoning in cattie is of economic importance in certain bracken infested areas of Brazil, inspite of the fact that there is no reference on that subject in the Brazilian literature.