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No definite time can be stated during which such a child should be
absent from school, seeing that the periods of infectiousness not only vary in
the different acute diseases, but that each disease has itself a very variable
duration of infectiousness: a medical examination therefore, can alone form
the basis on which an opinion can be founded as to the time when a child
who has recently suffered from infectious disease, is free from infection.
The Council are of opinion that all cases of infectious disease should be
immediately reported to the Medical Officer of Health, but they desire to
point out that the duty of investigating suspicious cases, and it should be
remembered that these constitute the majority of those in which a School
Board teacher would be interested, can only be properly performed by a
medical practitioner.
With regard to the second point, that of the necessity of preventing
children attending school, who are not themselves suffering from illness, but
who come from homes where they are more or less closely associated with
infectious persons, the Council think that no child living in a house with an
infectious person ought to be permitted to attend school unless such child be
living in rooms having a staircase different from that leading to the rooms of
the infected person, and that in all other ways have no relation with the
latter."
The report was adopted by the Society, with the addition of the
following paragraph:—
"The Society wish to point out that if a law for the compulsory
notification of infectious diseases were passed, the difficulties to which Dr.
Richardson and Professor Gladstone have called attention, would be greatly
diminished. The Society would therefore invite Dr. Richardson and Professor
Gladstone to bring this subject under the notice of the School Board, with a
view to requesting that Board to co-operate with the Society, and Sanitary
authorities generally, in seeking for legal powers to compel the notification of
cases of infectious diseases."
COMPULSORY NOTIFICATION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
I have on several occasions in my annual reports, referred to the
necessity of a registration of infectious diseases ; and in my last
annual report I specially noticed the fact that the city of Edinburgh
had obtained legislative powers for the compulsory disclosure of
cases of infectious disease.* As the Edinburgh Act makes it
"The Edinburgh Municipal and Police Act, 1879," Sec. 208.