View report page

97
The affected households are visited by the Lady Sanitary
Inspector, who gives the parents suitable advice as to nursing and
feeding the patients. A leaflet of instruction is left at the house,
and dispensary tickets given for those children needing treatment.
These leaflets are distributed and re-distributed to every tenement
in those streets where measles is known to occur.
The dirty tenements are disinfected at the end of the case. The
rooms were disinfected in 171 tenements.
Measles was very prevalent during the year, so that, for three
months, the Borough Council engaged the services of a special
health visitor to deal with the epidemic.
It was found that very few cases were being treated by doctors.
The rule is for the patient to be seen by a medical man once only,
that is, when the rash is first noticed. After the diagnosis has
been made, the mother thinks herself quite competent to treat
measles. Further, it is stated that some dispensary doctors wish
to revisit only when they are specially sent for. This casts the
onus of diagnosing complications unfairly upon the untutored
parent. When measles invaded a tenement house, the mothers
inhabiting it assumed that all the other diseases, attended with
rashes, which occurred amongst the occupants were also measles.
This assumption led to cases of scarlet fever being mistaken, for
cases of measles. Effective isolation of the patient was often
difficult and nearly always impossible. When the parents and 5
or 6 children live and sleep in one room, isolation is clearly
impracticable, though even then the mother attempts it by placing
the affected child at night to sleep at the foot of the bed while the
rest of the family sleep at the top. When the mother goes out
to work, the children are left in charge of the eldest child, who
is quite unequal to the task of isolation, or under the care of a
neighbour who goes in from time to time to see that all is well.
When the family occupies 2 or more rooms, the patient may be
isolated during the morning and the afternoon, but at meal times
the children are allowed to feed and to play together. Some
mothers consider it sufficient that they should take the infectec
children with them to bed at night.