[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Twickenham].

  • Twickenham (London, England). Borough Council.
Date:
[1955]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Twickenham]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/54 (page 5)
    FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT Lingering Death. If during the summer there had been 100 cases of poliomyelitis and 24 deaths there would have been a hullabaloo; the newspapers would have been full of it; I should have been inundated with letters and telephone calls and frenzied requests for advice and protection. As you can see from Table 31 in the statistical appendix, there were 100 new cases of tuberculosis and 24 deaths during 1954 but not a ripple stirred the calm of the Borough. Here is a menace in our midst which ought to stir us to frenzied activity. It is about the same every year; in 1953 there were 119 new cases and 28 deaths and so it goes on year after year. If poliomyelitis exacts its penalties of paralysis and even death, so does tuberculosis. In the case of every young person and adult who gets tuberculosis, just think of the frustrated hopes, and lost ambitions, the changed plans, the expense and worry, the protracted months of idleness and lost earnings to say nothing of the possibility of a sentence of death. Of all the infectious diseases, tuberculosis is the greatest killer, as is easily seen from the first nine lines of Table 3. We can eliminate tuberculosis from herds of cattle and render them disease free; can we do the same with human beings ? We can indeed; and by the same principles as we use in the herds. We must find the infected persons and try to ensure that they do not infect anybody else. The main reason tuberculosis smoulders on from year to year is because there are in the popula tion a proportion of people suffering from the disease who have never been detected; even they themselves may not know they have it. They are in addition to those who have consulted doctors or have been to the clinic and are therefore known. Many of the unknown cases are people past middle life, especially from 50 onwards. One of my records is that of a man who in 1940 was aged 56 and had a job as a caretaker. At that time he was not very robust and frequently suffered from what he called chesty colds. Over the next five years he was off work from time to time with his chest, but with the label given to his complaint as ' bronchitis.' However, in 1945, he was notified as suffering from tuberculosis and was then aged 61 He had to give up work. In the house were his wife and one daughter in her early 20's. The man did not go to a sanatorium, I forget now whether it was because there was no place for him, or whether it was he would not himself go. However, his wife was a sensible woman who understood the need for isolation and he was persuaded to co-operate properly. He was given a separate bedroom and his appearances when the daughter was about were kept to a minimum. He lived for 10 years more until aged 71 and all that time he was probably infectious and a danger to others. Somehow at these older ages, patients seem able to cling to their disease and to life. The disease is not strong enough to kill off the patient and the patient is not healthy enough to throw off the disease. The patient lives in symbiosis with his infection, that is the organisms living on the human tissues and both surviving. I think there must be many of these cases about the town. Many never seek medical advice at all and for years and years go about spreading tuberculosis to unsuspecting victims. 5