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14.
It can safely be said that the health of the school child remained
good during the year, excepting for an increased incidence of Measles and Whooping
Cough, which for a period adversely affected the attendances, particularly in the
Junior Departments of the Schools. The incidence of infectious diseases otherwise
was singularly low.
In view of the increased prevalence of verminous conditions and soabics
throughout the population as a whole, the school children were kept under constant
supervision and it will be seen that a total of 35,336 examinations of children in
School were made by the School Nurses and 826 individual children were found to be
unclean compared with 684 in 1940, and 967 in 1938 the last pre-war year.
Continued and careful observation was maintained of the nutritional
standard of the children attending the public elementary schools, as some
apprehension was felt that the limitations of foodstuffs over a protracted period
and an increasing cost of living, with which the income of the lower wage earner
might not keep pace, could result in numbers of children not having sufficient or
properly balanced diets. In this connection Table XII, giving the results found
at Routine Medical Inspections over the last four years will bo of interest and I
think it can be reasonably concluded that no deterioration in the nutritional
standard of the child population has so far taken place as a result of the war, and
my own personal observations confirm this. The vast experiment in scientific
feeding being undertaken by the Minister of Food and his technical advisors is
proving eminently successful.
The percentage of children returned as being slightly sub-nourished is that
most liable to wide variation, as these children are all border line cases and
whether they arc classed as normal or slightly sub-normal depends on the view of the
examining doctor who, moreover, is often influenced by such factors as the home
environment, the family income, whether or not the mother is at work, etc., as when
the child is classed as slightly sub-nourished he obtains priority in school feeding
and obtains accessory foodstuffs free of charge if tlx family income is within the
Council's economic scale.
In an endeavour to put a. check upon the figures of all the Medical Officers
who carried out the examinations, the results of one Doctor's findings were analysed,
as she had worked for a long period in the same schools and it could be assumed