Special report of the Medical Officer of Healh on an outbreak of scarlet fever, 1906-1907 / Glossop Urban Sanitary Authority.

  • Glossop (England). Urban Sanitary Authority.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Special report of the Medical Officer of Healh on an outbreak of scarlet fever, 1906-1907 / Glossop Urban Sanitary Authority. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    For purposes of comparison I present with this Report a table of the weekly incidence of Scarlet Fever during seven years, and have brought it down to Saturday, January 19th, 1907. I propose to date the epidemic from November 3rd, 1906, when the weekly numbers rose permanently above five. To avoid con¬ fusion I shall deal with the period between November 3rd, 1906, and. January 19th, 1907. It may be noted that about October is the time of greatest prevalence of Scarlet Fever in this country. During the period stated above, you will see from the table that we had 109 cases notified. This number does not include one Diph¬ theritic case, which probably had Scarlet Fever as well. During this period 63 cases were removed to the Hospital, there being 21 cases in the Hospital at the commencement of the period. The epidemic began in the Whitfield district, on the boundary line of All Saints’ and St. James’ Wards. It gradually extended through the Borough, Hadfield Ward being last affected, and the cases in that Ward being even now the least numerous. As regards preventive measures in the case of individual houses, if we do our best at all times, we can do no better in times of epidemic. I think we have done our best with the means at our disposal. We have used boiling when possible, cleansing, and chemical disinfectants. The routine may be learned from our sheets of instruction for disinfection, which have been distributed to the infected houses. Of course they do not include the aerial disinfection by sulphur dioxide, which is done by the inspectors on the recovery or removal of cases. Of course by recovery I mean not only recovery from illness, but also from infectiousness. With respect to individual houses the results have been good. Of 92 houses infected during the period mentioned, recurrence after the first notification has only taken place in eight. One of them was