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spreading when once it has found admittance into a family of
susceptible persons. In not a few instances, when removal was
obviously necessary to security, the greatest difficulty was
experienced in obtaining the parents' consent, but in no case was
recourse had to the compulsory powers of removal, such as they
are, which the Sanitary Act of 1866 confers. The cases were
generally of children, of school age. No child was knowingly
allowed to go to school from an infected house. The existence of
the disease was revealed occasionally by the registration of a death,
and its spread was not seldom the result of keeping patients at
home under circumstances that rendered nugatory any attempt
at isolation.
DISSEMINATION OF SCARLET FEVER BY MILK
OF DISEASED COWS.
Scarlet fever has recently acquired a new interest for
sanitarians, as the result of an outbreak in certain districts of
London and at Hendon, in December, enquiry into which has raised
a strong presumption that the disease may be of bovine origin.
This view of the origin of the particular outbreak has been adopted
by Mr. W. H. Power, Medical Inspector to the Local Government
Board, who was deputed to make an enquiry, and by Dr.
James Cameron, Medical Officer of Health for the district (Hendon),
where the cows were kept whose milk is believed to
have been the cause of the human disease. In a paper entitled
"Observations on a certain malady occurring among cows, at a
time when the milk produced by them disseminated scarlet fever,"*
which Dr. Cameron has recently read before the Epidemiological
Society, the cow disease is described as "not a new one;" it is
said to have been known to some farmers and cowkeepers as a
catching malady, under the designation of "sore teats," or
"blistered teats," of little importance; but never hitherto to have
been recognised or described as a specific contagious disease
amongst cows, or considered to have any concern with the causation
* The quotations are from an abstract of the paper, published in the
Lancet.