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These Articles enable a Sanitary Authority to deal with a school endangered by
infectious disease, eitlier in detail or as a whole, that is to say, either to exclude a
particular scholar, or a particular group of scholars from a particular class, or a
particular class or classes from a particular department, or else by closure to
exclude the infants, girls, or boys department from the school buildings, or by total
exclusion to close the entire school.
The process of exclusion is set in motion either («) under the Public Health (London)
Act, 1891, section 55, by the certificate of the medical practitioner attending the
patient, and report of the inspector as to the schools attended by the children in
the infected house, or (b) by the notification of the teacher under Article 148 (ii)
of the Code of Regulations and Instructions for the guidance of managers,
correspondents, and teachers, issued by the School Board for London, and generally
known as the School Board Code.
Article 148 (ii).—Any child showing symptoms of an infectious disease
or any child coming from a house where an infectious disease exists, must be
sent home at once, and the Superintendent of Visitors must be immediately
informed of the case, in order that enquiries may at once be made with a view
to proper steps being taken to prevent the children living in the same house or
tenement from attending school. The Medical Officer of Health for the
district must also at the same time be informed of the child's exclusion, and
furnished with the name and address of the child and the reason for its
exclusion on a form with which the teachers will be supplied by the head
office.
These infectious diseases include the dangerous infectious diseases, and also
certain other infectious diseases.
The dangerous infectious diseases are those set out by name in Sub-section 8 of
Section 55 (the Notification Section) of the Public Health (London) Act, 1891,
namely, smallpox, chickenpox, diphtheria, membranous croup, erysipelas, scarlatina
or scarlet fever, and typhus, typhoid, enteric, continued, relapsing and puerperal
fever. With reference to the septic diseases, erysipelas and puerperal fever, the
School Board Code, while requiring the exclusion of children actually suffering
from erysipelas, does not require the exclusion of health}' children attending
school from houses in which erysipelas exists, nor from houses in which there is
puerperal fever, and as children do not suffer from the last mentioned disease, for
school purposes, it is practically disregarded altogether.
The infectious diseases not set out in the Public Health (London) Act, 1891,
Section 55, but notifiable to the Medical Officer of Health by Head-Teachers under
the School Board Code, are chickenpox (exclusion 2 weeks), measles (exclusion 4
weeks), whooping cough (exclusion as long as the cough continues), mumps (exclusion
4 weeks), and ringworm (exclusion until cured). "Children coming from
houses where chickenpox, measles, and whooping cough exist, but who are not
themselves suffering from these diseases, must be excluded from school for
fourteen days."
To these infectious diseases might with advantage be added ophthalmia,
which is well known to spread in schools, and sufferers from which should be
excluded. As a precautionary measure also those suffering from certain dangerous