[Report 1959] / Medical Officer of Health, Liskeard Borough.

  • Liskeard (England). Borough Council.
Date:
1959
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1959] / Medical Officer of Health, Liskeard Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    owners and operators of caravan and canping sites would be required to comply with before a licence under the Public Health Act 1936, Section 269 would be granted by a County district Council. These new standard conditions are so designed as to achieve clean, hygienic and healthy conditions for caravan dwellers and campers and any new sites should therefore be satisfactory from the public health point of view. These new standard conditions have been generally adopted throughout the County, and their operation will I feel sure in the course of time enhance the good name of Cornwall as a place for a caravan or camping holiday. In recent years we have seen in Devon and Cornwall a less desirable type of itinerant holiday maker, I refer to those people who either elect or are forced to spend their nights sleeping in cars on roadside verges and lay-bys. That this way of spending a holiday is uncomfortable and fatiguing is largely a matter for those who do it, although I can believe that the participants in a holiday of this sort cannot be much of an asset to the organisation which employs them when they return to work. That they should cause the countryside adjacent to their halting places to become untidy, foul and insanitary from their litter and dejecta is something we are all entitled to complain about. My own view of these people is that they are for the most part feckless and irresponsible by nature having either failed to make proper arrangements in advance for their holiday accommodation, or in choosing this way of living without care or consideration for those who have to suffer the trail of filth which they leave in their wake. The fact that the practice has been seen to continue when there is accommodation on camping sites or in hotels, guest houses and farmhouses in the vicinity suggests that however much accommodation is made available some of these people will continue to spend their holidays in this cheap and nasty way. It will however be interesting to see if the provision of more camping sites to which these itinerants could gain admission and on which sanitary arrangements would be provided will do anything to reduce the size of the problem, and the degree of nuisance to landowners and the general public which it brings about each summer. The report of the Medical Research Council with the title Sewage Contamination of Bathing Beaches in England and Wales which was published in December 1939 has occasioned much comment and not a little hostile criticism. This latter critical attitude stemmed from the fear that the negative findings of the Research Committee in their investigation into an association between bathing in water polluted by sewage and disease might lull local authorities into a false sense of security and complacency about their sewage disposal arrangements. In my view this criticism though well-motivated by anxiety to see the problem of sewage contamination of coastal waters and inland waterways tackled, was hasty, ill-conceived and hardly just to the Research Committee, We are all aware of the potential danger which sewage constitutes when present in water and on beaches frequented by bathers. It was in an effort to define and measure more precisely the exbent and nature cf the hazard to health that the Committee undertook a long and searching enquiry into the matter. At the end of this enquiry they had no alternative but to report that they could discover no evidence that bathing in sewage contaminated water caused disease. I was not surprised at this finding since I have never encountered any case of disease v/hich I could honestly attribute to bathing in sewage contaminated water nor have my colleagues in general practice in this part of Cornwall ever drawn my attention to any such instance. It does not at all follow that because bathing in contaminated water does not appear to be dangerous to health that we can with impunity continue to discharge crude sewage into coastal waters or indeed any v/aterway. In my Annual Report for 1935 I urged that the necessity for proper means of sewage disposal be assessed largely on questions of public decency and amenity,aid less on any potential threat to health. The negative findings of the Research Committee support the view I then took and make it more necessary than ever that this problem be approached from the aesthetic angle. Our claim to be a civilized nation with a high standard of living rings very hollow if we are not prepared to deal energetically with our present disgusting habit of fouling coastal waters, inland watercourses, and land with our dejecta. Whilst on the subject of sewage disposal I want to refer to a difficulty which is beginning to be felt in the operation of sewage disposal plants. The end result of present methods of treating sewage is the production of a solid residue known as sludge. This material has to be removed regularly from the disposal plant, and it is here that the difficulty arises. Sludge although containing nitrogenous material which renders it suitable as a type of manure, is unpleasant to handle, - 3 -