I'm fairly sure I have some old reprints and notes on this one, Stephanie,
though it may take a few days to trawl them out into the light of day! As
far as I recall, on phosphorus-deficient pastures, lactating female bovids
become unable to sustain bone mineralisation, leading to an
osteomalacia-like condition in which the limb-bones distort under the
animal's weight, and metaphyses tend to collapse, causing abnormal joint
alignment. The effects are distinctly different to simply calcium-deficient
pasturage, on which cattle and sheep females tend to resorb bone from the
cortical endosteal margin and from non-critical trabeculae in, for example,
the ilium and mandibular diastema. In this case, the overall morphology of
the bone can appear entirely normal - until you section or x-ray it!
Anyway, that's from memory, and therefore unreliable. I will try to dig out
a little more about croiteach.
Terry O'Connor
On Jul 14 2005, Stephanie Vann wrote:
> As part of my PhD research I have been assembling a list of pathologies
> and the bony responses they generate. This has included wading through
> several articles, and also, for obvious reasons, Baker and Brothwell
> (1980), 'Animal Diseases in Archaeology'. Amongst the Miscellaneous
> Skeletal Disease I found one called Croiteach, also known as 'bog lame',
> 'cropac', 'croitich', 'creutuch' and 'cruban'. This is described as 'an
> osteodystrophic disease of lactating cattle and sheep that occurs on
> phosphorus deficient pastures'. However, I've been struggling to find
> anything more about it or any other references other than that in Baker
> and Brothwell. Does anyone happen to know whether this disease has a more
> 'scientific' name rather than just going by the long string of gaelic
> synonyms? If anyone had some suggestions as to precisely what this might
> be, or other places I might look, I'd be grateful to hear them as I'm not
> completely certain what it really is.Stephanie Vann
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