[Report 1962] / Medical Officer of Health, River Tees Port Health Authority.

  • River Tees Port Health Authority.
Date:
1962
Catalogue details

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

Credit: [Report 1962] / Medical Officer of Health, River Tees Port Health Authority. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/32 (page 5)
    to keep their public interest up when the disease is not present in the Country. It is amazing how many members of the public in Middlesbrough seem to have had to travel to Bradford, Birmingham, Cardiff and other infected places at the time the disease was there. As far as Birmingham and Cardiff were concerned, nearly all the travellers were people genuinely going there on business but when it came to Bradford, certain other considerations forced themselves to notice. First of all there is a Pakistani community in Bradford which seemed to be related or at all events on friendly terms with a number of members of the Pakistani community in Middlesbrough and prior to this outbreak, and no doubt since, it was quite frequent for some ‘bus loads’ of Middlesbrough Pakistanis to visit Bradford, particularly on Sundays, and vice versa. We were able successfully to discourage that during the time of the “Scare. Secondly, for some reason, people desirous of going to a pantomime last Winter seemed to come to the conclusion that the Bradford one was better than the Newcastle one, the Leeds one or any of the other alternatives and a very large number of Middles¬ brough clubs, guilds and individuals had booked places for the Bradford pantomime. They were very reluctant when advised to cancel these bookings because they felt they might not get their money back. On the other hand we felt that the loss of the price of a pantomime ticket was a small price to pay for not being infected with smallpox. There was then the fact that many shops in Middlesbrough derive goods from mills or wholesale warehouses in Bradford and that there is at all times a large lorry traffic between this town and Bradford and it was not felt that because a few people in Bradford had smallpox that one could bring the trade between the two towns to a full stop. People necessarily engaged on such business therefore ranked for high priority for vaccination. As far as vaccinations were concerned there had to be priorities because the Country had been caught with a serious shortage of vaccine lymph. Part of this was due to the fact that in spite of the hortatory policy of local health authorities the public had become increasingly indifferent to vaccination which is not now of course legally compulsory and when the public in their anxiety—and one might almost in certain places have called it panic—came demanding vaccination in shoals, there was not enough to go round. First of all, no Medical Officer of Health could afford to allow his stock of vaccine to be expended as, had a case of smallpox broken out, there would then have been none left to inoculate the contacts, so a small basic reserve of a few hundred doses had to be maintained. Secondly, those going on essential business to the infected areas had got to receive consideration and those who had been in the infected areas before the outbreak became known. After them case the people who voluntarily and of their own free will insisted on going to the infected areas.