[Report 1958] / Sanitary Committee [- Medical Officer of Health], Cornwall County Council.

  • Cornwall (England). County Council.
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1958] / Sanitary Committee [- Medical Officer of Health], Cornwall County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/118 (page 39)
    EPIDEMIOL(3GY AND PREVENTIVE MEDICINE p General 1 It is now ten years since the introduction of the National Health Service i. Act, and during this time considerable changes have occurred in hospital I] and general medicine, which on balance, have been advantageous. It is interesting to see what effects the years have had on epidemiology. In the table below I have set out the average number of notifications of the more important notifiable diseases in the first two and the last two years of the period;— Disease 1949/50 1957/58 Scarlet Fever 238 75 Whooping Cough 685 688 Diphtheria 9 2 Measles 2,118 2,720 Pneumonia 214 162 Meningococcal Infections 5 2 Poliomyelitis (Paralytic and Non-paralytic)... 104 19 Dysentery 32 22 Ophthalmia Neonatorum 3 2 Puerperal Pyrexia 64 126 Food Poisoning 57 36 Erysipelas 53 22 Tuberculosis 345 215 There has been a marked reduction in Scarlet Fever and Erysipelas, due. no doubt, to the great improvement in antibiotic therapy. Diphtheria and Poliomyelitis both show considerably reduced incidence. The first, at least, can be taken as testimony of immunisation and preventive measures in general, including better housing, but it is too early to say whether this is also true of poliomyelitis. No impression has been made on Measles, which still claims nearly 3,000 victims each year, and somewhat surprisingly, there has been only a slight reduction in notifications of Pneumonia. Vaccination against Whooping Cough was introduced in Cornwall in the second half of 1952, and subsequently has been fairly widely practised amongst children under 5 years of age. Notifications in Cornwall are com- paratively few, and fluctuate so markedly from year to year that it is too early as yet to judge the protection afforded, but figures for England and •Wales show a marked drop both in notifications and deaths over the past four years. Puerperal Pyrexia is apparently more prevalent, but this is accounted for by a change in the Puerperal Pyrexia Regulations, which came into force in 1951, and by which the criterion of diagnosis is considerably more stringent.