[Report 1964] / Medical Officer of Health, Cambridge Borough.

  • Cambridge (England). Borough Council.
Date:
1964
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1964] / Medical Officer of Health, Cambridge Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The odd case of typhoid fever which is mentioned in Part II of this report occurred in an undergraduate who must, I think, have become infected in his home town while visiting his parents. During the incubation period he had travelled about a great deal and in Cambridge had eaten in six different restaurants. It will give some idea of the immense amount of work which is involved in one case of this kind (to try to find the source of infection and to prevent the spread of the disease) when I say that, in Cam- bridge alone, 99 people had to be visited and interviewed (on several occasions for each person) and nearly 300 specimens taken and examined by the Public Health Laboratory—a lengthy and elaborate process. Other enquiries and investigations had to be made in other towns which the patient had visited. Infectious disease enquiries and investigations of this kind are the most important activities of a public health department and account for a large part of the v/orking time of many members of the staff: not only those who seek out and interview patients but those who do the clerical and recording work. This is work which does not attract much notice but it is a reason why we often seem to be slow in getting on with more spectacular things. The outbreak of paratyphoid fever at Aberdeen also produced a great deal of work for us in Cambridge in seeking out tins of corned beef which might be infected from the same source as those in Aberdeen. Very large stocks of this product had to be examined and 787 6-lb. tins were collected and returned to the wholesalers as the Ministry of Health requested. I find that it is becoming increasingly difficult to fill vacancies in the establishment and we have gone through long periods with posts unfilled. Since work has to go on other members of the staff have to take on duties additional to their own and, while this can be done for a short time I do not see how it can go on indefinitely without serious ill effects. I think that there is an aspect of the staff problems in public health (and, no doubt, in other fields of human endeavour also) which has not yet been seriously faced: we are simply running out of the supply of available people. Take the case of a nurse as an example. It requires a certain level of intelligence and a certain temperament to be a nurse and, fifty years ago, a girl who had the necessary intelligence and who wanted to enter a profession would probably make a choice between nursing and teaching according to her temperament. Al- though the population has increased in numbers during the last half cen- tury there is no reason to suppose that the proportion of people of various levels of intelligence and types of temperament has altered very much, but
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