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17
It will be seen on carefully perusing the sections that a person is liable to heavy
penalties if he exposes infected clothing or allows a person suffering from Measles
to be in a public place.
It also makes it compulsory to have the premises disinfected after a patient
has recovered from Measles. Yet it is the duty of no one to notify the Medical
Officer of Health of the existence of the disease. How, then, is he to find out where
people are suffering from Measles in order to have the premises disinfected ?
In all the other diseases (where these sections apply) unless a medical man is
in attendance, it is made compulsory on the head of the family, and in his absence
on the nearest relative, to at once communicate with the Medical Officer of Health.
In a number of cases no medical man is even called in to attend to a child suffering
from Measles, and when he is, he is not obliged to notify. Therefore, the disease is
not notified by the doctor in the usual way. Parents will not voluntarily give the
necessary information to the Sanitary Authority, and thus bring upon themselves
the resulting trouble and inconvenience of having their rooms, clothing, etc., disinfected.
They regard Measles as a trivial disease, and in the light of a "necessary
evil." Instead of isolating the patient, they generally allow the other children to
come in contact with him, so that all the other children will have the disease and be
laid up at the same time. Therefore, to expect them to voluntarily notify the
disease is absurd. If we attempted to enforce the sections mentioned in the Order
by Police Court proceedings, I am afraid we should meet with failure on each occasion.
As it is not compulsory either to notify or to call in a doctor, how are we to
prove that the parents knew that the patient suffered from Measles? If they
informed the Magistrate that they did not know that the disease was Measles, we
could not contradict them, and the case would be at once dismissed.
It is true that we often receive information from the teachers of the Board
Schools that children are absent from school through Measles. This information is
not of much use, as we cannot very well verify the statement. The Medical Officer
of Health has neither the power nor the time to visit these premises to verify the
statements as to whether the children are suffering from Measles or not. Besides,
by the time he receives the information from the School the specific symptoms
have perhaps disappeared, and it would then be impossible for anyone to diagnose
the disease with any certainty.
The information received from the teachers is far from being conclusive
evidence that the child is really suffering from Measles. The source of their knowledge
is either the attendance officer who has called to inquire the reason of the
child's absence, and has been informed that the child has Measles, or possibly another
child from the same family informs the teacher that the reason of the child's
absence is due to an illness. When pressed as to what he is suffering from, he
replies that it is Measles. Both these sources are unreliable, and do not justify
B