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48
twelve years. We recommend further that when small-pox
shows signs of becoming epidemic special facilities should be
afforded both for vaccination and re-vaccination.
We think that notification of small-pox should everywhere be
compulsory, and, whenever the disease showed a tendency
to become epidemic, a notice should be served by the sanitary
authority upon all persons in the neighbourhood who would be
likely to come within the reach of contagion, urging them to
submit to vaccination or re-vaccination, as the case might be, if
they had not beenrecently successfully vaccinated or re-vaccinated;
and attention should be called to the facilities afforded for their
doing so. Attention should also be called to the importance of
avoiding contact with persons suffering from the disease, or
coming into proximity to them, and of avoiding contact with
any person or thing which may have become infected. It is
important to notice that, even where vaccination has been
neglected, there is great readiness to submit to it in the presence
of a threatened epidemic: a large number of vaccinations are
then obtained willingly and without opposition. Whenever a
sanitary authority has received notification of a case of smallpox,
we think the fact should be at once communicated to the
vaccination authority of the district in which the case of the
disease has occurred.
We desire to call attention again to the recommendation, which
we made in our fifth interim report, that persons committed to
prison by reason of the non-payment of penalties imposed under
the vaccination laws, should no longer be treated as criminals.
We stated in that report our reasons for this recommendation, to
which we still adhere. If, however, the changes in the compulsory
provisions of the vaccination laws which we have suggested
were adopted, the matter would lose much of its importance.
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