[Report 1928] / Medical Officer of Health, Northampton County Borough.

  • Northampton (England). County Borough Council
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1928] / Medical Officer of Health, Northampton County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Encephalitis Lethargica Enterica Erysipelas Chickenpox Vaccination Smallpox One case of acute encephalitis lethargica was notified during the year, the patient being a schoolgirl aged five and a half years. The illness commenced with sickness and headache, the child becoming comatose, the disease ending fatally three weeks after onset. In addition to this, two deaths of cases not previously notified were attributed to chronic encephalitis lethargica. In one, the patient had been ill for two years and in the other seven. In no instance was there any spread of the disease to other members of the household. Two notifications under this heading were received during the year. One was a woman, aged fifty-four, who did not appear to me to shew the usual symptoms of typhoid. The blood reaction was negative. She recovered without any complications, The second was a boy from out of town, who developed paratyphoid A in the General Hospital. He also recovered. The attack-rate was 0*02 (England and Wales 0*09). Fifty-three notifications of erysipelas were received, this being over forty per cent, above the number for the previous year. Two were from out of town, leaving fifty-one actual Borough cases. Four deaths were certified as being due to erysipelas and in one case notified as suffering from this disease death was attributed to septicaemia, which apparently followed the bite from an insect, the kind of insect not being known to the patient or her relatives. The case-rate was 056, compared with 0*42 for the country. Owing to the presence of smallpox in the Town during the latter half of the year, chickenpox was made notifiable by an Order which came into force on 20th August. Between that date and the end of the year, 210 cases were notified either by general practitioners or parents. These were visited by the inspectors, and where there was reason to doubt the diagnosis the Medical Officer of Health also paid a visit. In this way we picked up several cases which were undoubtedly mild smallpox. For many years Northampton has been a stronghold of the anti-vaccinationists and when smallpox invaded the Town in the summer it found a large proportion of the population un¬ vaccinated. The Education Committee issued a leaflet to parents advising that all children not previously vaccinated should be vaccinated without delay, but to this appeal there was a sur¬ prisingly poor response. On 23rd January, I was asked by a general practitioner in the Town to see a suspected case of smallpox in an unvaccinated woman, aged twenty-seven years. The patient shewed all the signs of suffering from an attack of smallpox similar to the type which had been prevalent in certain parts of England and Wales