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78
does the inoculation and finally, their cards are collected as
they leave the medical inspection room. There is very little
commotion and we seldom have any crying even in the Infants'
schools with the result that in the early days, we often got as many
as 300 children done in 1½ hours, having disturbed the ordinary
school routine very little.
We decided at the same time to make a concentrated attack
on the child of pre-school age and for this purpose a Clinic was started
on Saturday mornings. The Health Visitors distributed circulars
to the mothers at the Welfares and also encouraged them to bring
older children as well. So successful was this enterprise that it
was resolved to establish an immunizing clinic at each of the 7
Welfare Centres in the Borough for the convenience of mothers
who could not bring their children along to the Saturday morning
clinic. It was very easy to take the materials along with us to
the various centres and the fact that the mothers could see us at the
work stimulated many who had previously refused immunization,
to give their consent.
We adopted the method of injecting 1 cc. of Toxoid Antitoxin
Mixture (B. & W. T.A.M.) intramuscularly into the left
deltoid, an interval of three weeks being left between the 1st and
2nd injections and 4 weeks between the 2nd and 3rd.
The epidemic of Diphtheria, as we have mentioned above
commenced in October, 1932, and continued into 1933. Any report
dealing with 1933 only, will fail to show the progress of the
epidemic and the effect of our work in its true perspective. We
propose therefore, to make this a comprehensive account and to
include the period from October 1932 to December 1933.
That the opportunity for establishing immunization was
seized at the right moment will be evident from the figures which
follow and it seems probable that the epidemic was stayed by our
efforts. Starting in October, we gradually worked through the
schools and by the end of the Christmas term we were already well
on with the work in five schools, namely: Southfield Road School
the County School, Derwentwater, John Perryn and Rothschild
School. We chose these schools because they were in the districts
where the disease was most prevalent. After Christmas, we commenced
the work in the following schools: Beaumont Park, Roman
Catholic, Berrymede, Priory, and Acton Wells. At the beginning
of June, we had visited each school three times and the bulk of the
work was finished. We were now ready to commence re-schick
testing in the schools where we had started, as six months had now