[Report 1959] / School Medical Officer of Health, Newport (Gwent) County Borough.

  • Newport (Wales). County Borough Council.
Date:
1959
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1959] / School Medical Officer of Health, Newport (Gwent) County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This programme was not fully implemented until the Autumn term 1955. The group done during the Summer term 1955 was a pilot programme to ensure the smooth performance of the full programme for children reaching the age of 14 during the school year 1955-56. It is satisfactory to report that the fall in the numbers coming forward for tuberculin testing and B.C.G. vaccination in 1958 as compared with 1957 was followed by a rise in the numbers coming forward in 1959 as compared with 1958 which almost reached the 1957 figure. It had been feared that the fall in 1958 was partly due to parents thinking that a child who had been immunised against poliomyelitis did not need to be vaccinated against tuberculosis, and partly due to parents not being prepared to take the trouble to sign consent forms for both procedures, and no doubt this was the case. However presumably increasing familiarity with poliomyelitis immunisation led to a reduction in the influence of these factors. This is just as well for tuberculosis killed thirty-four times as many people in England and Wales in 1958 as poliomyelitis did (4.480 as against 130). It will be seen that there has been a fall in the percentage of children found to be tuberculin positive from 20.9% to 9.4% during the five years in which the full programme has been carried out, indicating a fall in the sources of tuberculosis infection. If the result of the pilot programme is included the fall has been from 27.1% to 9.4%, but this result is not strictly comparable, partly because the numbers were much smaller and more important because the children were eight months older and had been exposed to infection that much longer. It will also be seen that the very large falls in the percentages of children found to be tuberculin positive seen in the earlier years has not been repeated on this occasion, which suggests that the fall in the reservoir of sources of infection is itself decreasing. This in turn is confirmed by the fact that over the country as a whole the fall in the number of deaths from tuberculosis has itself almost ceased. Tuberculosis is by no means dead yet. It is as well that B.C.G. vaccination has at last been accepted in this country, as without it the removal of sources of tuberculous infection, which in most cases produce immunity rather than disease in those exposed to the infec- tion, would have produced a population increasingly susceptible to the disease. In particular the compulsion to have milk tuberculin tested or pasteurised re- moved the oportunity to have what in most cases was a symptomless but immunising infection. TUBERCULIN TESTING Tuberculin testing was offered during the year to all children reaching their tenth and sixth birthdays during the school year and it is interesting to compare the figures with those for the three previous years. TB- % TB + % Total 1956: Children reaching 10th birthday .. . 1.073 88.8 135 11.2 1.208 1957: Children reaching 10th birthday .. . 1,285 90.5 135 9.5 1.420 1958: Children reaching 10th birthday .. . 1.257 94.4 74 5.6 1.331 1959: Children reaching 10th birthday .. . 1.104 94.8 60 5.2 1.164 Total . 4,719 92.1 404 7.9 5.123