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bo exercised by any two or more members of the council acting on the
advice of the Medical Officer of Health, The work to which the section is
to apply is the making, cleaning, washing, etc., of wearing apparel. It
would seem, therefore, that the chief difficulty attendant upon the nonadmission
of laundries to the provisions of the Factory Acts is overcome by
this section, as the sending of any clothes to be washed in a house where
there is infectious disease may be forbidden by a District Conncil.
Sections cxxvii to cxxxii, which relate to notices, registers, and
returns, contain some new provisions of interest to Medical Officers of
Health. Thus it is provided by Section cxxxii that the Medical Officer of
Health shall in his annual report to the Council report on the administration
of the Act as to workshops and workplaces. It was formerly the duty
of the Medical Officer of Health to give notice to an inspector whenever he
found any woman, young person, or child employed in a workshop. This
duty is now restricted to cases where there is no abstract of the Act fixed
up in the workshop (Section cxxxiii).
The most important amendment of the 1901 Factory Act is the section
relating to Bake-houses. No underground bake-house may be used after
January 1st, 1904, unless it is certified by the District Council to be suitable
for that purpose. Each of the bake-houses in Stoke Newington will therefore
have to be dealt with in that year, in order that the Council may
decide as to whether any of them should be closed. Doubtless underground
bake-houses present many features of which the Sanitarian disapproves,
but it is certain that a very great deal of hardship will result in Stoke
Newington, where the majority of the bake-houses are underground, if the
Council avails itself of its power to close them.
FOOD AND DRUGS.
Under the sale of Food and Drugs Acts, 90 samples of Food and
Drugs were taken and analysed. The results are shown in Table C.
Fifteen of the samples were not satisfactory and, therefore, the percentage
of non-genuine samples amounted to about 16 per cent., a
figure which is higher than that of the preceding year, when it was
6 per cent.
21 per cent. of the milk samples were unsatisfactory, as against 11
per cent. during the preceding year.