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Smallpox.
There were no cases notified during the year.
Food Poisoning.
There were no serious outbreaks of food poisoning in the Borough during the
year 1950. Notifications totalled 18 and no deaths were attributed to food poisoning.
All the four outbreaks were of undiscovered cause. They involved a total of nine
persons. There were nine single cases. Salmonella organisms were identified in
four of these.
Investigations concerning one of the notified cases revealed that two members
of a family were ill, tinned meat pudding being the food suspected. However,
other members of the family had eaten the meat and were not ill. No specimens
were available for examination.
Another case concerned a mother and two children who became ill when the
family returned from holiday from a Kent coastal town. The food suspected
in this case was artificial cream in buns which the family had eaten whilst on holiday.
A further case concerned a man whose grandchild had been ill with diarrhoea.
As the patient's wife had been nursing the child it is possible she had transferred
the infection to her husband.
Chicken dripping eaten by the patient was suspected in another case of food
poisoning concerning a boy aged 12 years. Other members of the family had not
eaten this food and were not ill.
In all the above cases the illness was of short duration with symptoms of diarrhoea,
abdominal pains and vomiting.
Poliomyelitis.
There was again a high incidence of poliomyelitis during the summer months
of 1950, 53 confirmed cases occurring in the Borough, compared with 25 during
1949 and 23 during the first serious epidemic in this country in 1947.
Of the confirmed cases, 38 were classified as paralytic and 15 as non-paralytic
I am pleased to say, however, that 25 patients made a complete recovery.
Eighteen patients have some degree of paralysis remaining and four are still in
hospital. There was one death from poliomyelitis and one from polio-encephalitis.
There is no information of the four other cases.
Tuberculosis.
The number of primary notifications of tuberculosis was 205, a decrease of
51 on the previous year's total. Of the total number of notifications, 183 were in
respect of cases of pulmonary tuberculosis. There were 58 deaths from this disease
during the year, as against 59 in 1949 and 82 in 1948.
The following table shows the decline in deaths from tuberculosis during the
last ten years, during which the number of deaths from this disease has been halved.