[Report 1949] / Medical Officer of Health, Skelton & Brotton U.D.C.

  • Skelton and Brotton (England). Urban District Council.
Date:
1949
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1949] / Medical Officer of Health, Skelton & Brotton U.D.C. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I can visualise such an important procedure as the group discussion being profitably carried out in other places than Infant Welfare Centres, for instance, among such groups as food handlers, steelworkers, miners, etc. I do not decry the lecture or the leaflet when once interest has arisen. Further instruction by lectures, leaflets, periodicals, or books is most useful but interest must first arise among the persons to be taught. I have written at some length on health education because I feel that health educa¬ tion not restricted to exhortations by means of leafllets, posters or the occasional lecture, but organised on wider lines, is one of the most important weapons in the armoury of preventive medicine. The death-rate continues to give warning that the population is an ageing one; the number of over-sixties is increasing and is forming an ever greater proportion of the nation. The present tendency is to relegate these persons to retirement where they rust useless alike to themselves and to the country ; there, when all is said and done, they have to be maintained by the efforts of the other relatively diminishing age groups. This may have been reasonable in the nineteenth century when few of the over-sixties could expect to survive more than a few years so that the over-sixties were numerically unim¬ portant. To-day the span of life has been prolonged with corresponding delay in the onset of senescence. Is it still the right policy that retirement should be expected at the age of sixty-five ? A certain proportion of the over sixty-fives will be found medically unfit for further employment; some will not desire it. But, a goodly proportion are both fit and willing to prolong their working life, perhaps in some cases at a diminished tempo. Is it not worthwhile that such persons continue to be usefully employed ? I wish to stress that tuberculosis is an infectious disease ; at the present time it is the most crippling and killing of all the infections in Britain. While the total elimination of the human type of infection is probably unattainable under present conditions, a great reduction in its incidence is practicable. The treatment of tuberculosis under the Health Service is handled by the Regional Hospital Board ; the social measures have devolved on the Local Health Authority ; the Local Sanitary Authority remains responsible for general hygiene, housing, the abatement of overcrowding and the epidemiological aspects of its control. Of all the conditions that are to a certain extent remediable to-day the abatement of overcrowding and, where necessary, the rehousing of the infectious tuberculous person are of an importance second to none. Of equal importance is the early diagnosis of the disease and here mass radiography plays a vital role. The Mass Radiography Unit was located at Guisborough and Carlin How during the month of May so that its services were readily accessible to the inhabitants of the District. Another essential activity is intensive preventive work in the patients’ homes, since the education of the public in the ways and means of preventing tuberculosis is another vital factor. The public must realize that tuberculosis is preventable. To provide conditions in which interest in its prevention arises is the duty of the health educator, the means of prevention are there if the public will use them. The public must understand that although tuberculosis is infectious the tuberculous person need not spread the disease