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Not the least valuable advantage of having a local laboratory is the time factor
which is so important in medicine. In many cases it is of vital importance to produce
the result of a pathological examination within a few minutes or at the most, an
hour or two; with only a distant laboratory to rely on there is inevitably a delay bf
many hours, which may be fatal.
One of the most widely examined fluids in Pathology is urine, which is a
notoriously perishable liquid and in most cases must be examined immediately after
voiding to obtain reliable results. Further, there are a number of organisms which
die out within an hour or two of leaving the body and which would not therefore
survive long enough to be transported by post.
Numbers of patients have already experienced the advantage of being able to
have tests carried out near their homes, instead of suffering the fatigue and expense
of journeys to London Hospitals.
There has been prepared a comprehensive catalogue of all the tests which can
be carried out in this Laboratory, and which has been circulated to all
the Medical Officers. It would be superfluous to print this in a report of this
nature. In the space available it is only possible to give a bare outline of some of
the lines of enquiry which have been examined.
A constant source of problems is the pregnant woman. It is becoming increasingly
apparent that there is a very large incidence of anæmia among the women in
industrial districts, and we have found by wholesale blood tests that Barking is no
exception to this rule. Such anaemia if untreated may become very severe and is
definitely a great source of danger during pregnancy. It is not necessarily due to
acute illness but arises chiefly through continuous malnutrition or multiple
pregnancies or both. Sufficient work has been done here and elsewhere to show that
the administration of iron to expectant mothers as a routine precaution should be
an important part of ante-natal supervision. Whenever the anaemia becomes severe
enough to cause distressing clinical symptoms, full blood tests are carried out in order
to determine the type of anaemia present, and the patients are given suitable treatment.
Whenever it is considered advisable, such patients are followed up
post-natally.
The toxaemias of pregnancy provide another source of pathological examinations
which must be carried out in order to help determine the severity of the toxaemia,
and also to trace the patient's progress under treatment. Incidentally, workers in
this field have found that the anaemic woman is much more liable to toxaemia than
the woman who has been treated for anaemia with iron.