View report page

76
RINGWORM AND SCABIES.
As a result of the notifications from the schools, 282 cases of
Ringworm and 74 cases of scabies came to knowledge, and were
investigated by the Officers of the Public Health Department.
123 or 436 per cent, of the ringworm cases, and 39 or 51.3 per
cent. of the cases of scabies were found to be or were persuaded
to place themselves under the treatment of a hospital or medical
practitioner. Of the cases remaining untreated, 94 cases of
ringworm and 9 of scabies were treated at the Isolation Hospital
as out-patients. At the Isolntion Hospital there were also treated
40 cases of impetigo, an infectious skin disease, 4 cases of
ophthalmia, and 29 cases of other diseases, while 52 cases
recovered from infectious skin diseases were also certified by Dr.
Stephens, the Assistant Medical Officer at the hospital as fit to
return to School.
The problem of dealing with infectious skin and other allied
affections in school children is beset with difficulties. Ringworm,
impetigo, scabies, verminous heads, ophthalmia, are highly
infectious conditions necessitating the exclusion of the scholar in
the interests of the other children. They form a group of diseases
showing little tendency to natural cure, and some of them require
careful, painstaking, and even tedious treatment if they are not to
drag themselves out t hrough years of disfiguring misery. Impetigo,
lousiness, and scabies are easily cured if properly and vigorously
attacked, but the indolent filthiness of the parents, who will in
many of these cases neither seek nor follow advice, leaves the
little sufferers to linger on a danger to others and a semi-tolerated
misery to themselves.
It is no uncommon thing to find children excluded from
School because of these ailments employed in earning a pittance
instead of in getting themselves cured. In one such case—a case
of scabies—the child was employed in a butcher's shop. In a