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132
(k) Dental Defects.—The general findings of routine medical
inspection demonstrate the value of the dental services you have
inaugurated. What has to be said this year is said in the Report
of the Dental Officer and a more complete statistical review will be
submitted next year when owing to the increased services we shall
have a fuller opportunity for inspection.
(1) Crippling Defects.—Crippling defects are happily only
infrequently found during routine medical inspections, and a
number of these are of a relatively minor character.
Your orthopaedic service, allied to the orthopaedic service
carried on by the Public Health Committee has done really useful work.
(6) INFECTIOUS DISEASE.
The problem as to if and whether infection tends to be spread
more by ordinary school life than by closing schools and allowing
the children to run wild is a perennial one, and the general consensus
of opinion at the present time is that the closing of schools is on the
whole to be deprecated.
It is pointed out that unfortunately the sanitary circumstances
of school life, even where these are not what we would wish them to
be, are better than those of home life, and that, even although a certain
amount of infection may be spread at school, this is negligible
compared with what would be spread in the homes, particularly
where the infectious disease is one which is commonly treated at
home and where home isolation is impracticable or otherwise is not
likely to be efficiently carried out.
It is also suggested that by keeping the children at school they
can be kept under more careful observation and cases of infectious
disease detected earlier than they would otherwise be, to the advantage
of the community and of the individual.
This advantage depends entirely on the relative merits of the
sanitary circumstances of school life compared with home life, and
if therefore the present tentative opinion in favour of keeping
schools open is to be consolidated, it behoves everybody to see
that school life represents a higher level of sanitation than home life,
even when home life has the advantages of the more modern housing
circumstances found on your own and on the London County
Council estates.