Dr. Parsons's report to the Local Government Board on a recent outbreak of enteric fever in the borough of Buckingham / [H. Franklin Parsons].

  • Parsons, H. Franklin (Henry Franklin), 1846-1913.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Parsons's report to the Local Government Board on a recent outbreak of enteric fever in the borough of Buckingham / [H. Franklin Parsons]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in its way would carry with it impurities from the surface, and from leaky drains, cesspools, &c. It is rarely the case that the upper part of a well is made watertight with a view to exclude soakings from the surface soil. The following incidents told me by residents in Buckingham show how porous the upper strata in the town are. At a house in the centre of the town, the watercloset drains into a cesspool, the overflow of which goes into a second cesspool. The first cesspool is emptied every year, but the occupier [of the house told me that the second cesspool had not required emptying during the 25 years that he had resided there. In a yard in another part of the town some paraffin oil was spilled on the ground ; shortly afterwards the water in the well was found to taste and smell of the oil, and a few weeks later that in a well at the next house but one also did so. This happened last year and the taste and smell of the oil are said to be still perceptible after heavy rain, though not in dry weather. In some of the outlying parts of the town, water has to be fetched a considerable distance. This is especially the case at Mount Pleasant, alluded to in the reports of the medical officer of health, an outlying row of cottages of a poor class: here water has to be fetched from a dipping well some 400 yards distant. It would appear from the annual reports of the medical officer of health, and from the statements of medical practitioners in Buckingham, that cases of enteric fever, more or fewer, occur in the borough every year. During the 10 years 1877 to 1886, the average annual death rate from fever (almost entirely enteric) was • 36 per 1,000, the average rate for England and Wales during the same period having been 30, and in those years there were local groups of cases in places where defective sanitary conditions were reported to exist. In the autumn of 1887, four cases in widely separated parts of the borough came to the knowledge of the medical officer of health. The first of these, Beckett, was a girl, a servant at an hotel, and hence perhaps exposed to the risk of imported infection, who about October 7th went home ill to an out¬ lying cottage. At this cottage there was a foul privy, and the well water was polluted, but the disease did not spread there. Another of the cases, about a month later, was that of a farm boy, Colman, living at the top of the Gfawcott Hoad at the opposite end of the borough, but who passed the above- mentioned cottage every day on his way to and from his work, though he is not known to have come into contact with its inmates. Close to the house in which he lived is an offensive untrapped drain grid, and an unpaved sewage- sodden yard. The privy, which is built against the next house, had previously been reconstructed with a shallow cemented pit occupying merely the space under the seat—a form of privy which may be admissible under suitable circumstances, and when not too near a house—but with singular wrong-headedness the water from the roof of the next house had subsequently been led by a pipe into the privy pit, and then to get rid of it again a hole communicating with the drain had been knocked through the bottom of the pit. Hence the excreta of the fever case thrown into the privy would infect the sewer which runs down the Gawcott Road. (This sewer is a 9-inch pipe sewer with a steep gradient; it is unventilated except by the drain inlets, from which offensive smells are said to proceed.) In January and February 1888, an extensive outbreak of enteric fever occurred in Gawcott Road, Bath Lane, and Mitre Street, Church End. During those two months 25 households in Church End were invaded by the fever, the number of cases in these households being about 80. (These numbers include 22 cases of fever occurring in six households on that side of the Gawcott Road which is in Radclive parish, and therefore just outside the border of the borough.) The first of these case&', that of Paul Soton, age 13, living on the Radclive side of Gawcott Road, came under medical treatment on Januarv 1st, when he was undoubtedly suffering from enteric fever, but he had then been ill for several weeks with abdominal pain, diarrhoea, and wasting, and on December 26th had been markedly worse, with profuse vomiting and discharge of very offensive peasoup-like stools streaked with blood. He had therefore no doubt been suffering from enteric fever for some time before a 54041. 200.—6/88. Wt. 1733. ^ 9 Enteric fever. Previous prevalence. Cases in 1.887. Sudden outbreak at Church End in Jan. and Feb. 1888