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73
It may be of interest to give here an account of the cost to the
Borough of this fumigation and cleansing. For fumigation two men
are employed whose total wages amount in the year to £175 2s. 3d.
The material, such as sulphur, etc., and apparatus etc., £18 4s., the
total cost being £193 6s. 3d. which works out at a little over 1s. 8d.
per room for fumigation. The number of rooms cleansed after
infectious disease during the year amounted to 622, the wages of
cleansers and materials to £327 9s. 3d. This amounts to a cost of
a little over 10s. 6d. per room cleansed. This appears to be a high
price for cleaning a room; but the advantage of having a direct
control over the cleansing more than makes up for any slight excess
in the cost. The articles disinfected at Millfields station during 1903
numbered 16,949. The details are given in the table below. With
respect to the cost of this disinfection, which, by the way, is effected
by means of high pressure steam, I find the total amount expended
during 1903 for this purpose was £496 15s. 7d. This includes the
wages of four men, the keep of a horse, repairs to station and
machinery, coals and stores. This amounts to about 4½d. per
article. This is not a large amount considering that the most of the
articles are of large size. In addition to the disinfection of these
articles, many infected household things as well as clothings were
destroyed at the request of the owners.