[Report 1939] / Medical Officer of Health, Bury County Borough.

  • Bury (Greater Manchester, England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1939
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1939] / Medical Officer of Health, Bury County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    At the end of 1939 a scheme was approved and adopted to discover children of bad and of subnormal nutrition. Roughly the scheme is to search for all such children at all clinics, at school inspections by the School Nurses, at mass inspections by the School Medical Officers at schools, and to act on information given by teachers, school attendance officers and others. In short, to take every step possible to discover children of under normal nutrition. The children are then examined thoroughly at the Clinic, and if it is thought by the School Medical Officer who makes the examination that the state of insufficient physical con- dition is due to lack of nourishment, the nourishment is supplied free by the Local Authority. From September, 1939, new Regulations concerning the ex- clusion from school of contacts of cases of Measles, German Measles, and Chicken-Pox were introduced. Formerly, infants and other children who had not had the diseases and who were contacts of cases of Measles, German Measles or Chicken-Pox, were excluded from school three weeks from the date of the last exposure to infection. In view of the exceedingly low mortality associated with these diseases, and also in view of the fact that during outbreaks of the diseases most children prone to contract infection would be infected whether they attended school or were excluded and stayed at home, it was held that there was no point in excluding contacts from school. The new regulations were approved by you and by the Board of Education. After seven months’ working of the regulations, they can be stated to be satisfactory. Thus a large proportion of children have attended school who otherwise might have stayed at home, and the inci- dence of these infectious diseases has not increased. Another very interesting feature is that during the latter mouths ot 1939 from September there were less infectious disease « cases of all kinds in Bury than for a long period of years. The reason for this phenomenon has not yet been elucidated. We expect and find that the number of cases of any specific infectious disease vary Irom year to year, but I have never found in this County Borough that cases of all infectious diseases were at a minimum at a given time as they were during the months of September to December in 1939. Some Epidemiologists have su§TTSted that the phenomenon has been due to the increased open-air hie led by the children due to the enforced holiday. I am