[Report 1944] / School Medical Officer of Health, Carlisle City.

  • Carlisle (England). City Council.
Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1944] / School Medical Officer of Health, Carlisle City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/26 (page 3)
    It is encourag'ing to note a substantial reduction in the number of cases of scabies, a condition which has come to be regarded as a war-time ‘‘ visitor ” associated with evacuation, overcrowding, and bad housing conditions. The energetic campaign, described in previous reports, to keep this condition under control continued on similar lines, and we trust that, with the gradual lessening of war-time measures of living, the prevalence of scabies will show a steady and continued fall in incidence. The regrettable increase in the number of cases of diphtheria was unfortunate when one considers that the \ number of school children who had already been immunised was 79 per cent. One half of the number of cases diagnosed as diphtheria were amongst immunised children, but, though the infecting organism was of the “ gravis ” or “severe toxic” type, all the cases made a satisfactory and uninterrupted recovery. The disease amongst the non-immunised children was of a much more severe clinical type and there was one death. Thus, though immunisation does not completely protect against the risk of infection with diphtheria it lessens and modifies the severity of the disease. It would therefore be unwise to allow these statistics to act as a deterrent to the enthusiasm of the campaign to render the child population immune against this serious disease. The number of cases of tuberculosis among school children, though higher than last year, is below the average for the five war-time years.