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THE HEALTH OF BARKING
This service is very popular and whilst every effort is being made to cope with
the ever-increasing demands upon it, a shortage of qualified staff makes it unavoidable
for patients to wait comparatively long periods for treatment. As I have said
before, I anticipate that when this service is provided in the different localities of
the town the demand will be even greater than it is today.
The activities of the clinic, which is held in the East Street Clinic (behind the
Town Hall), are demonstrated in Table IX in Appendix B.
Skin Clinic.
This clinic was started in 1942 and Dr. Arthur Burrows was soon afterwards
appointed as your Specialist Consultant in Skin Diseases. Dr. Burrows holds
weekly consultant sessions at the Barking Hospital and in addition treatment sessions
are held.
Skin conditions which resist treatment can be baffling to the doctor and cause
much misery and loss of morale to the sufferer; to have such a service locally,
therefore, is a source of great satisfaction to me.
A comparative record of the work of the clinic is shown in Table X in Appendix B.
Scabies. "Scabies," remarks the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of
Health, "ever a war disease, increased enormously during the war of 1914-1918,
alike among the troops and the civil population. After 1919 there was a rapid
decrease and scabies, reaching its nadir about 1926, became almost a rare disease,
especially in the South of England. About 1930, a rise began, probably largely
periodic in character as it was observed in other countries about the same time.
Judging by the medical examination of London elementary school children, the
incidence was once again as high in 1938 as in 1919, and was rising fast. Thus a
rapid increase was in progress when war began, and fanned first by evacuation and
mobilization, and, later, by overcrowding, industrial shifting of population, and
the ever ncreasing shortage of laundry facilities and of soap, towels, underclothing
and bedding, a severe epidemic of scabies blazed up."
To cope with this situation, the Scabies Order, 1941, was made and this gave
local aut orities the opportunity of using effective measures for controlling the
disease. Where special facilities existed in a Borough for treatment, the Minister
permittee the disease to be locally notifiable and this step was taken in Barking.
It is not possible, owing to wartime shifts in population to follow the picture of how
this general increase affected Barking but it certainly gave rise to a big problem.
The crux of the problem lies in the realisation that this is a family disease spread
by close contact, most commonly by the sharing of a bed. It is useless, therefore,
to treat one member of a family without being sure that the other members are not
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