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20
INFECTIOUS AND OTHER DISEASES
The total number of notifications of infectious disease during
1962 was 423, as compared with 1,248 during the previous year. The
reduction in number was more than accounted for by the much smaller
number of cases of measles and there were increases in the notifications
of dysentery, ophthalmia neonatorum and puerperal pyrexia.
Smallpox
On Christmas Day 1961 a visitor from Pakistan arrived in
this country and stayed in the neighbouring borough of St. Pancras.
He became unwell and visited a hospital out-patient department in the
early hours of December 28th when his condition was diagnosed as
smallpox, The tracing of contacts was made more difficult because
it was not known immediately that on his journey from Karachi he had
changed planes in Paris,
At about the same time other cases of smallpox came to
light in persons who had travelled from Pakistan or who had been in
contact with them, and the position was made more difficult because
in some of the earlier cases the patients had died before the disease
had developed sufficiently for a firm diagnosis to be made.
The matter was given much publicity by the press and the
calls for vaccination became so great that special clinics had to be
set up in London and in many other parts of the country and at one
time there was a temporary shortage of vaccine lymph.
In Hampstead a small number of contacts were visited and
kept under surveillance but a more difficult task was to try and discover
other contacts, natives of Pakistan, who were known to have travelled
in the same plane but whose names and addresses were unknown.
None was found in Hampstead and no case of smallpox occurred in the
Borough.
During January, 1962 the number of contacts in Hampstead
from cases in other parts of the country and from a small outbreak
in Dusseldorf increased and by the end of January notifications were
being received through the Ministry of Health of all visitors arriving
from Karachi who had given a Hampstead address. There had been