Mr. W. H. Power's report to the local government board on diphtheria at Hern Hill, in the Faversham rural sanitary district ; on the sanitary state of that district ; and on administration by the rural sanitary district.

  • Power, W. H.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mr. W. H. Power's report to the local government board on diphtheria at Hern Hill, in the Faversham rural sanitary district ; on the sanitary state of that district ; and on administration by the rural sanitary district. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    7. We have now to ask with regard to the Prances, in what way they can first have contracted the disease. There was nothing in the local conditions to attract particular attention. The house is a good roomy farm-house, but in a decidedly exposed situation. Water is drawn from a well between the dwelling and the cattle-yard. From its situation it might be apprehended that the well would be liable to contamination by soakage from the muck in the yard. The water, however, was analysed l)y the late Medical Officer of Health, Mr. Wynter Blyth, and stated to be good. Milk for the household is furnished by their own cows, and is not supplied to other families in the village. Nothing was known to have been recently brought into the house to which any suspicion of infection could possibly attach. No person from the farm liad visited any place or come in contact with any person that could be suspected of infection. No tramp, or stranger, or visitor from other parts was remembered to have come to the house. 8. There had been, it- was rumoured, some cases of diphtheria at Fremington and Sutcombe. Fremington is beyond Bideford, some 20 miles distant, and I made no enquiries there. Sutcombe is a village in the HolsAvorthy Union, only six miles from Hurley Mead, and I heard that a girl Annie Sanders, in service at Sutcombe, had gone home ill with diphtheria, in the latter part of May, 1879, to her mother’s in West Put- ford, only four miles from Hurley Mead. I could get no nearer than this, either in time or in distance. Mrs. Sanders told me that her daughter was ill for a long time, almost through the summer, with the after effects of the disease, but no other person at West Putford was known to have been attacked. She named three families in Sutcombe that had had attacks of diphtheria. I could get no evidence that either Sutcombe or Putford had had any communication with Hurley Mead ; yet I cannot hel]3 suspecting that this outbreak at the latter place depended in some way, perhaps by an unnoticed chain of personal intercourse, or possibly not by personal intercourse at all, but, in the mode suggested by Mr. Wynter Blyth in his brief report to the Bideford Rural Sanitary Authority on the Woodfardisworthy epidemic, by wind transport of diphtheria germs, with the previous prevalence of the disease at Sutcombe or Putford. I regret that my enquiry in this district took place after Mr. Wynter Blyth’s resig- nation of the Health Officership, and that I could not have the advantage of his aid and experience. HUBERT AIRY.