[Chlamydial infection in mass abortions in goats]

Etiologic and clinical-and-epizootiologic studies were carried out of a chlamydial infection in goat flocks where abortions took place on a mass scale. Discovered were two foci of chlamydial abortion. Two strains of Chlamydia psittaci were isolated from aborted fetuses and from placentas on two farms. The strains were identified both antigenically and morphologically. The serologic investigation of a total of 167 goats on 6 farms with abortions revealed that in the course of two enzootics as many as 93.67 per cent of the goats that miscarried had complement-fixing titers ranging from 1:32 to 1:1024, the average geometric titer being 84. In the contacts and the goats that gave birth normally the average geometric titers were 11.3 and 9.8, respectively. In four of the enzootics with abortions 82.14 per cent of the goats were serologically negative, and the average geometric titer was less than 2.