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ANNUAL REPORT
OF THE
MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH
FOR THE YEAR 1960
August, 1961.
To the Chairman and Members of the
Ruislip-Northwood Urban District Council,
Mr, Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The year was uneventful from the Public Health point of view. The
district has once again enjoyed a relative freedom from infectious
disease. Again there has been no case of diphtheria notified - it is now
as long ago as 1946 since a case occurred in the district. This freedom
from diphtheria can only be maintained by a realisation that immunisation
must be kept up to as high alevel as possible, and in the absence of the
disease, this becomes more and more difficulty Up and down the country
there have been minor outbreaks of diphtheria and it is imperative, if
similar trouble is to be avoided in this district, that parents accept
the facilities offered them for the protection of their families,
Immunisation is now offered against diphtheria, whooping cough,
tetanus, poliomyelitis and smallpox. The details of the procedures
involved are always available either from the family doctor or the local
child welfare clinic, or from the health visitor, and the necessity for
maintaining immunity by boost injections at the proper times should not
be forgotten. The number of these various injections tends to confuse
some people, but this slight inconvenience is much to be preferred to
uncontrolled outbreaks of disease.
The number of cases of measles was, as expected, quite low - 65 as
against 1078 in the previous year, and there was no death from this
disease. There were more cases of whooping cough - 89 as against 11 - but
there were no deaths, and only one case was severe enough to necessitate
hospital admission, There was no case of poliomyelitis, and it seems
there is at last some prospect of being able to deal with this disease
by giving susceptible people a degree of immunity either by the injection
of a vaccine or by giving a vaccine by mouth. Much work is being done
all over the world on these two methods and a good deal of success has
been achieved,
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