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126
These remarks on disinfection are submitted in order to adjust the perspective
of those persons who believe that disinfection of school classrooms is a necessary
precaution against the spread of infection. Disinfection is costly and where unnecessary,
a waste of public money.
In the matter of prevention of infectious illness in the schools, it should be the
aim of the teaching staff to secure, as far as possible, that no child is sent to school
in an ailing condition. For this purpose no opportunity of seeking the co-operation
of parents to this end should be lost. The parent is the key to the situation, and yet
it is from parents mainly that complaints and uninformed suggestions are received
when outbreaks of infectious illness occur in the vicinity of a school and their children
contract the prevalent disease. Almost invariably, the school is blamed for that
for which the parents themselves are responsible to a large extent. If a child who
exhibits signs of illness such as sore throat, headache, sickness, severe catarrhal
symptoms, etc., is sent to school, the degree of risk to his schoolfellows is measured
by the extent of the child's contact with other pupils either in school or on the way
to school, and thereby careful parents suffer from the thoughtless. The only means
of overcoming the parental attitude, which is probably very largely the outcome of
ignorance rather than of apathy, is vigorous propaganda through the combined
efforts of the officers of central and local authorities including teachers, school
doctors, school nurses, medical officers of health, and health visitors. Even school,
attendance officers whose primary function is to secure maximum school attendance
must have always before them the necessity of warning parents against sending
ailing children to school.

School
inspections
in connection
with
infectious
illness.
Strict supervision of children attending the Council's schools is exercised and
the visits of assistant medical officers and/or school nurses are paid to schools where
cases of infectious illness have occurred among the pupils with a view to ensuring,
as far as possible, that all sources of infection are eliminated in order that healthy
children may continue to attend school without risk of infection due to school
attendance.
Scarlet fever.

During 1928, 7,505 cases of scarlet fever were reported as occurring among
children attending the Council's schools, and 132 schools were visited from time to