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8
Clean Food:
The dangers of food poisoning arising from unclean handling of food
continue to cause disquiet to all persons concerned with public health and
the Council has had under consideration the formation of a Clean Food
Guild and Association as a means of combating this evil, but it is evident
that not much headway can be made unless public opinion demands
improvement in this direction just as the 'personal' services all arose
from public demand and voluntary effort when the reports of sanitary
departments such as those mentioned above made the public aware of the
necessity for those services.
For instance, the wrapping of bread has been advocated for many
years and when the Council considered the Model Food Handling Byelaws
of the Ministry of Health it was suggested that if the wrapping of
bread at this time was a difficult matter to enforce, bread delivered by
roundsmen should be in paper bags to avoid the possibility of fouling by
handling and through laying bread on doorsteps and otherwise, but if
the public are satisfied with present conditions the Ministry are not
likely to enforce any alteration in delivery.
There are, of course, considerable powers in existence for prevention
of danger from unclean handling of food: for instance in Section 13 of
the Food & Drugs Act, 1938, but those powers are frequently nullified
by legal argument. A brief note on this point is contained later in the
report on page 39.
Reorganisation of Duties of Sanitary Inspectors:
In Stoke Newington, as elsewhere, because of war-time conditions,
many of the duties carried out by the Public Health Department fell into
abeyance, leaving considerable arrears of work in such matters as the
inspection of factories, outworkers, shop premises and under the Housing
Act generally, and during the year a scheme was drafted for reorganising
the work of the sanitary inspection in the Borough and for allocating
additional duties to certain of the sanitary inspectors.
It is now the general practice to allocate a certain number of sanitary
inspectors to districts and to require others to devote the whole, or a proportion
of their time to such duties as housing, inspection of food premises,
sampling, rodent control and disinfestation, for which experience and
training over and above that for district inspection is necessary.
In adopting this distribution and specialisation of duties as the best
means of providing an efficient environmental health service, Councils
have been influenced by the following factors: