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usually made because the child had been in contact with a known case and had suffered from
paroxysmal cough and vomiting.
It would seem that there are now two different kinds of whooping cough — one the well-known
and more serious, classical whooping cough which occurs in the unimmunised child and another,
a much milder disease, which is usually associated with a paroxysmal cough and vomiting, but
often without a whoop in the child who has been immunised. "
Sonne Dysentery
Sonne dysentery is a mild form of dysentery which is very infectious, especially among infant
children in certain circumstances. The modern view about the spread of this disease is that the
organism thrives best in a cold, damp and dark environment.
In 1958 330 cases of sonne dysentery were notified in Hendon. The disease began in epidemic
form in the middle of November and persisted through a long spell of sunless, foggy weather.
Cases were reported from 18 different schools in the Borough, but three school suffered especially
severely.
Dysentery is a difficult disease to deal with from an administrative point of view, because
there are two schools of thought as to how to approach the problem of the prevention of its spread.
One school of thought advises complete exclusion of infected children from school until successive
negative tests prove them free from infection, while another school of thought prefers to treat
dysentery in the same way as a common cold and exclude only those children who are ill for the
duration of their illness. These administrative difficulties probably arise from the fact that the
infectivity of the organism is not constant — at some times it seems to be more infectious than at
others — and there seems little evidence that the adoption of the second method of control is less
successful than the more complex method.
If it is a fact that sonne dysentery is commoner in sunless weather, then it may be that we
will soon include it in the list of diseases which we hope to prevent when smoke control makes a
cleaner atmosphere.
In the course of the epidemic it was noticed that some of the early cases carried the
organism for the longest period. This fact supports the idea that sonne dysentery may be more
virulent in the early stages of the outbreak and that there is a waning of the infectivity of sonne
dysentery towards the end of the outbreak. Many of the children experienced loss of appetite for
some weeks after the illness.
The number of notified cases decreased fairly rapidly during a long spell of dry weather in
January of the following year.
Food Poisoning
Thirty-six notifications of food poisoning were received during 1958, nine more than in 1957.
In recent years much progress has been made in the classification of the different organisms
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