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to hospital, public agitation commenced and demonstrations occurred
outside the residence of the child concerned. Scientifically there is
doubt as to the value of hospitalisation of all non-paralytic Poliomyelitis,
but until the public is educated to recognise this situation
it is inevitable that all notified cases must be removed as expeditously
as possible to hospital isolation.
The National Immunisation Campaign against Poliomyelitis
commenced in March, 1956, and before March, 1957, cards from
3,972 volunteers had been received. The County Council, through its
Area Office, arranged for the inoculations to be given, and before the
end of 1957 the general practitioners completed the immunisation of
1,068 children and the Assistant Medical Officers 2,214, giving a
total of 3,282 children. The antigen used was British Type vaccine,
and results are to be assessed on a national scale.
4. SMALLPOX. At 4.45 on the afternoon of July 1st, a
telephone bell in one of the offices rang and the Department was
requested to trace a man whose name was given and whose wife was
said to live in Wembley, address unknown. At 9.00 that evening a
report was being given to the Health Committee of the full circumstances
of a suspected case of Smallpox.
The man under investigation had returned from a business trip
to Kano, on the 29th March, and on the 11th April called in his
private doctor on account of intense abdominal pain suggestive of
obstruction ; pyrexia, which was followed by extreme prostration and
a temperature of 102°F. On the 13th April the patient developed an
erythema, at which stage the practitioner, suspecting Smallpox, called
in a consultant who, however, stated that the case was not one of
clinical Smallpox. A short time afterwards vesicles appeared and the
patient experienced an uneventful recovery.
Fourteen days later the patient's daughter, aged eight, who had
been vaccinated in infancy, developed a similar vesicular rash which
was diagnosed as a second attack of Chicken Pox. The little girl,
during the course of her illness, was visited by an uncle who subsequently
was taken ill on the 13th May, admitted later to a hospital
in Tottenham, and died on the 17th May, with a provisional diagnosis
of Leukaemia. Post-mortem specimens were removed from this
patient and taken to the laboratory in another hospital where a cleaner
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