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In order to improve liaison and to further our own knowledge
of psychological disorders, I arranged with Dr. Davidson, Consultant
Psychiatrist, Ilford Child Guidance Clinic, for the Medical Officers and
Health Visitors interested in a particular child to attend the relevant
case conference. We have found these meetings of immense value in
furthering our understanding of the problems involved, and I think
too that the intimate knowledge of the whole family possessed by the
Health Visitor has often been of great value to the members of the
Child Guidance team.
I should like to place on record my appreciation of the wholehearted
co-operation and help we have received from Dr. Davidson
and the other members of the clinic staff.
INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
Exclusion
Our attitude towards the exclusion from school of children who
have been in contact with infectious disease is gradually becoming less
stringent. We are coming to realise that those infectious diseases which
can be prevented (e.g. diphtheria and smallpox) are controlled mainly
by our methods is of immunisation and vaccination, quarantine measures
playing very little part in the prevention of spread.
Disease such as measles, chicken pox and mumps are, in our
present state of knowledge, not preventable and nearly every child
catches them at one time or another. These diseases can be very
serious in infancy and it is wise not to expose babies to infection, but
they cause little trouble in childhood. They tend to give rise to complications
if caught in later life—for example Mumps can cause sterility
and we now now that such virus diseases as German measles in an
expectant mother can cause the birth of a baby congenitally blind or
deaf.
Quarantine does not prevent—it merely postpones an attack until
an age when the loss of schooling is more serious, or even until
adolescence or early adult life when complications may occur. Contacts
of scarlet fever, chicken pox, etc. are no longer excluded and there
would seem lit; purpose in continuing our present practice of excluding
contacts of measles and whooping cough.
Dysentery
Of the fifty-nine cases of dysentery in the Borough during the
year forty-two related to an outbreak affecting the Monteagle Infants
and Junior Girls' schools.
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