[Report 1959] / Medical Officer of Health, St Albans City.

  • St. Albans (England). City Council.
Date:
1959
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1959] / Medical Officer of Health, St Albans City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/44 (page 16)
    under the age of seven months. (2) A living virus but attenuated so that it is harmless, has been extensively used in America, Russia and, under close control, in this country. So far the difficulty, in this country at any rate, has been that although the virus is harm¬ less to the person it is given to, sometimes it becomes virulent on passing through that person and can give rise to cases of definite poliomyelitis in others, but this difficulty appears to be on the way to solution. One possible advantage in vaccination by this form is that it is given by mouth and not with a syringe. The principle of living, non-virulent vaccines is very old, vaccination against smallpox is one, but of course it is absolutely necessary to be sure that there is no risk of provoking the real disease. Winter Sickness This illness has again been fairly prevalent during the winter. The diagnosis is not by any means always clear, after all many conditions will cause vomiting and diarrhoea, but where we get the really typical cases characterised, in children at any rate, by the explosive vomiting, there is no reasonable doubt. It was noticed that in these cases there was a tendency to sore throats or sore noses and we started taking nose and throat swabs for all cases, whether the diagnosis was entirely clear or not. The results were very interesting; provided these swabs were taken within 48 hours of the onset of vomiting, they all shpwed the presence of staphylococcus where the diagnosis was clear. Most of the other cases, where the diagnosis was by no means clear, were negative. Then the types of staphylococcus isolated became very interesting in that many of them were the types of stapyhlo- coccus usually associated with food poisoning. The fact that there were several different types isolated was also in accordance with our clinical experience whereby some cases had a tendency to re¬ occur in about 3 to 4 weeks. This is our experience in accordance with the streptococci in scarlet fever, where it is well known now that one attack of scarlet fever does not produce immunity to attacks of other types of streptococci. It is too early yet to assert categorically that we have found the cause of winter sickness but I very much hope that other Medical Officers of Health in different parts of the country will check these results and see if it is the same elsewhere. My own results so far bear it out all over my Division, including Harpenden and Boreham Wood, but it is essential that the nose and throat swabs be taken within 48 hours of the onset of vomiting. Sub¬ sequent swabs are usually negative.