Can markets control animal disease or is government intervention and regulation necessary? This is the question Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode address in Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy and Conflicts of Animal Disease Control, their superb history of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI). Their answer is the latter. Based on the concept of One Health—the fundamental interconnection between the health of humans and animals—they argue that in the battle against animal disease, centralized and coordinated action was and is necessary. “Much more than agricultural productivity was at stake…approximately 60 percent of all infectious diseases affecting humans (and 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases) are shared by other vertebrate animals” (p. 3). The authors test the two major views of public economics—the public choice school and the public interest school—by examining the development of an effective animal disease infrastructure. They conclude that “in the case of animal diseases, market failures were serious, and government-led research and collective action generated immense benefits for the nation and the world” (p. 7).

Arresting Contagion braids economic history, political history, business history, animal history, and the history of science and medicine into a lucid and compelling narrative. The book is organized chronologically by disease outbreaks of contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia, Texas cattle fever, foot and mouth disease, hog cholera, trichinosis, “lumpy-jaw” (actinomycosis), and bovine tuberculosis that provided the impetus to establish the BAI and shaped its operation, and by political battles over legislation provoked by these disease outbreaks.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States experienced frequent, serious outbreaks of epidemic animal disease that were becoming more widespread, damaging to commerce and investment, and dangerous for human health. Expanding animal populations, concentrated in stockyards and dairies and increasingly mobile on railroads and steamboats, facilitated the spread of disease. Equines and livestock experienced a “worsening health environment” (p. 22). Some European nations banned imports of American beef and pork. These animal diseases were poorly understood and hard to control. The livestock industry was composed of many different stakeholders in many regions—farmers, transporters, and processors—with different and sometimes opposing interests. Consumers and public health officials were stakeholders as well. State governments passed quarantine laws, armed patrols attempted to stop livestock from crossing state and property lines, and livestock producers asserted rights of interstate commerce. All parties turned to the federal government for redress. The Bureau of Animal Industry was founded in 1884, though not without a six-year battle in Congress. The BAI was “an important step in the rise of the federal administrative state, in the growth of American scientific infrastructure and in the development of modern economic regulation” (p. 44). This advances the rise of federal regulatory power, usually marked by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.

There was a pattern to disease outbreaks. “Eruptions of contagious diseases induced confusion and fear…[and] led to paralysis and fighting over authority and the distribution of costs. Absurd denials were common, local officials and business leaders often proposed a wait-and-see strategy, and the owners of suspect stock frequently scrambled to hide or sell their animals” (92). But since the germs didn't wait, the BAI began to acquire important authority “to inspect, quarantine, and condemn infected and suspect animals” (p. 80). Depending on the circumstances and the nature of the disease, the BAI sought eradication in response to some, and a policy of vaccination for others, in particular hog cholera. Trichinosis proved to be difficult to attack because while the disease was dangerous to humans who ate infected meat, it was not dangerous to hogs. Compensation for condemned animals was a critical issue, as well as damages to humans from diseased meat and dairy products. In crisis after crisis, market forces first caused diseased animals and products to be sold because unless all parties in the meat and dairy industries participated in disease control, it was financially disastrous for any one individual to do so. Nor did the tort system provide adequate motivation to take quick action against disease outbreaks. Federal intervention and regulation was necessary to eradicate or control animal disease. Over time, stakeholders came to a consensus of supporting the BAI, responding more quickly and cooperatively to disease outbreaks, but it was not a smooth process, as the violent resistance to eradicating Texas cattle fever (pp. 263–69) or the Iowa Cow War over bovine tuberculosis (pp. 293–94) demonstrate.

The development of scientific and medical knowledge about animal disease is a story of progress, yet the authors also show that it was lengthy and contested. The germ theory of disease took decades for full acceptance, amid a natural process of research and dispute. Even leading researchers such as Daniel Salmon (the first head of the BAI) made what later proved to be significant research errors. Meanwhile the invisibility of disease rendered adequate market knowledge nearly impossible for both sellers and buyers. All of this worked against market self-regulation and in favor of government regulation.

Arresting Contagion is impressive in its scope and depth, its contribution to the literature of several historical fields, and its relevance to current events. A puzzling lacuna in this book is the lack of veterinary history. Though veterinarians are often mentioned, there is little about the particular history of veterinary education, training or professionalism, and the index has no entry referring to veterinarians, veterinary medicine or science. This seems the only significant gap in what is otherwise an exceptionally well-written, accessible, and important book. Olmstead and Rhode accomplish the difficult task of providing lucid and dramatic narratives of how policy and politics really happen. If theory interrogates history, then the authors have used economic theory to open a new window into the history of animal disease control, science and medicine; if history tests theory, then Arresting Contagion succeeds by replacing abstract economic forces with the material realities of historical experience.