View report page

90
FOLLOWING UP.
Vide Annual Report for 1923.
INFECTIOUS DISEASE.
The procedure carried out in regard to infectious disease,
notifiable or otherwise, was considered in detail in my Annual
Report for last year. Teachers contributed their assistance from
time to time by excluding suspicious cases and contacts, and
notifying the School Medical Officer of such exclusions. As in
previous years, most reliance was placed on intelligence received
from school attendance officers, more particularly when dealing
with non-notifiable infections. During the months of January and
February, a severe outbreak of measles occurred, necessitating
the closure of all schools for three weeks. During the last quarter
of the year mumps gave rise to a troublesome outbreak, 195 cases
and 127 contacts being notified and excluded from school.
By virtue of the Board of Education Amending Regulations,
No. 2(a), 1924, now in force, "when the average attendance of
a school or department for any week has fallen below 60 per cent.
of the number of children on the registers, and the Local Education
Authority are satisfied by a certificate from the School
Medical Officer that the fall in attendance to so low a percentage
may reasonably be attributed to the prevalence of epidemic illness
in the district, the meetings and attendances for that week need
not be reckoned in calculating the average attendance for the
purpose of the Board's grant." Such action as suggested may
thus be undertaken as opportunity offers instead of the hitherto
more general practice of school closure, a practice, it may be said,
which tended to deprive the Medical Officer of Health of much
essential fact regarding the ebb and flow of non-notifiable infections
amongst school children, besides being obviously of considerably
less utility in urbanised than rural areas, while, for example,
in the case of diphtheria, these recent. Regulations would appear
distinctly superior to that of school closure in coping with the
average type of outbreak.