[Report 1904] / Medical Officer of Health, County Council of the Palatine of Chester / Cheshire County Council.

  • Cheshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1904] / Medical Officer of Health, County Council of the Palatine of Chester / Cheshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    days. The infant was vaccinated, and all the contacts who would submit to it were re-vaccinated, and the disease did not spread. In the Borough of Dukinfield small-pox has been prevalent for two years. Notification was received of the first case on December 26th, 1902. There had not been a case in the town for some years. The patient, an adult, had apparently been infected in Lancashire. He was promptly removed to Hyde Hospital, where he recovered. The other members of the family were vaccinated and placed in quarantine for 14 days. The house was fumigated and disinfected, and the bedding, etc., was destroyed. Notwith- standing all these precautions this case proved the first of what may be called a small epidemic in 1903. The first case was admitted to Hospital on February 11th, and seems to have been infected bv a mild unnotified case, and there seem to have been several of these, unattended by medical practitioners, and only discovered in the course of tracing infection. The Medical Officer of Health is convinced that if information could have been obtained sooner of these mild cases, the number of persons infected would have been considerably smaller. Not one of the 29 persons who were known to have small-pox in 1903 had been re-vaccinated. Four of the patients were unvaccinated, and of this number were the only cases (3) in which the eruption was confluent. The only patient who died in 1903 was an unvaccinated infant, five months old. Though no fresh cases were reported in 1903 after August, there seem to have been light unnotified cases which kept infection alive till January, 1904, when another case was reported. This case should have been notified earlier, but it was very mild, and when the owner of the mill where the patient worked notified the disease, there were 5 other cases in the house. From these 6 cases 5 others were infected, but notification was again too late to enable the Authority to check the spread of infection. In the first seven months of the year the number of notifications received were re- spectively as follows : 1, 8, 5, 7, 5, 2, 6, making 34 cases in all. The last case was reported on August 22nd. In 1904, as in 1903, not one of those attacked had been re-vaccinated. The only two patients who had a confluent eruption had not been vaccinated at all. The only patient who died from small-pox in 1904 was an unvaccinated woman, 45 years of age. There were three distinct outbreaks at Hyde in 1904. In the first outbreak 3 cases were notified respectively on the 4th, 5th and 6th of January. These were 3 men who had been in the company of a man removed to Hospital suffering with small-pox on December 20th, 1903. In the second outbreak also there were 3 cases : they were notified respectively on the 26th, 29th, and 30th of January. These three cases were traced to an Insurance Canvasser, who visited the men at their houses, when he was suffering from small-pox. The third outbreak commenced on June 20th, and eventually included 40 cases. The initial case was the keeper of a common lodging-house in