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33
Tuberculosis.
The drop in new notifications from 152 to 120 will be noted with
relative satisfaction. This disease, however, caused 35 deaths
which although it represents a reduction as compared with the previous
year, is still a terrible thing.
Hospitalisation is not a complete preventive answer. Good
housing, good hygiene–personal and communal–early diagnosis
and treatment, isolation of the chronic positive case, preventive
vaccination wherever practicable, perhaps above all the education
of everyone to an understanding of the disease, its problems and the
method of attack upon it–these represent factors of vital significance.
Households containing a tuberculous victim are, and are
likely to remain for long, an inevitable happening in our midst.
Tuberculosis must be appreciated as a social problem without
being distorted into a social stigma. It is not only a personal
disease–it is one which has vital repercussions extending in ever
widening circles from the sufferer, through his family and dependants
to the community as a whole. The attack upon it, therefore, must
take cognizance not only of the patient but also of all the other
factors which go to complicate the problem of treatment in its
widest and most real sense.
Our priority re-housing scheme is continuing to function
satisfactorily but it need hardly be said that a family without previous
local claims cannot expect to be immediately re-housed solely on
medical grounds.