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East Barnet Urban District Council
EIGHTY-EIGHTH
ANNUAL REPORT
of the
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH
FOR THE YEAR 1961
To the Chairman and Members of the
East Barnet Urban District Council.
I have the honour to present my report for the year 1961.
There are perhaps one or two items worthy of special comment
from among the mass of detailed information packed into the report
—which gives as a whole a picture of an average healthy district that
has made considerable effort to progress with improvement of housing,
enforcement of food hygiene, and of smoke control.
It will be seen that 1961 was a "measles year," but in this anti-biotic
era there are few serious complications. Doctors who have been in
practice for twenty or thirty years must continue to marvel at the
changed pattern of the common infectious diseases. But lest selfsatisfaction
should creep in there is. of course, the balancing menace
of the increase, for example, of leukaemia, not to mention the ever
prevalent scourge of cancer.
Sonne dysentery has given some problems for the Department during
the past year, particularly in the case of one of the older and
smaller schools in the district where there was an outbreak which
lasted for some considerable time. There is always the problem of
the exclusion of the persistent carrier, but this has been eased by the
ready co-operation of the school staff in enforcing rigorous sanitary
measures, thus enabling the affected children to carry on at school
before the actual freedom from infection.
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