[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell,

  • Camberwell (London, England). Metropolitan Borough.
Date:
[1904?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Camberwell,. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/87 (page VIII)
    food which affected the majority of the cases ; indeed, the only circumstance common to nearly all was that they drew their water supply from the Southwark and vauxhall Water Company's mains. The number of cases was not large enough to state definitely that the water was the source of contagion, but the date of infection in these cases that I have specially referred to coincides with a period when the examining chemist reports a particularly bad state of this company's water. For the rest of the year, however, the notifications showed a marked lessening from those mentioned in my previous report and were accompanied by a corresponding diminution in the number of deaths, there being only 18 compared with 29 in the previous year, the falling off being especially noticeable in Peckham and St. George's. Measles caused 75 deaths as compared with 109 in 1902; 13 of these occurred in Camberwell, 21 in Peckham and 41 in St. George's. On April 1st, 1903, the new ordinances of the London County Council in reference to dealing with this disease came into force. It will be remembered that by their action, practically all the sections of the Public Health Act which related to infectious diseases were made applicable to measles, with the exception of that relating to its notification. Since this date a record has been kept of all cases of which we received intimation, which were almost invariably from the schools. At first we received some information from medical men in attendance, but they subsequently rightly decided not to notify unless the fee that is paid in the other infectious diseases was also forwarded in this. We not infrequently found that the patient had been ill some time previously and was now quite well; indeed it was by no means uncommon to disinfect on the same day that the notification was received, the patient having recovered. A reason for this is that on Saturday morning during school term we get a large number of notifications, usually equalling in number those received during the previous week, and consisting of those cases which have presumably come to the knowledge of the school authorities during the week, while during the vacations the notifications are practically nil. I can only repeat what I have said in