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67
ANNUAL REPORT 01 THE STATISTICAL COMMITTEE.
The report of the Statistical Committee opens with a reference to
the increased efficiency of Notification, and to the fact that, through
provisions contained in the Public Health (London) Act, 1891, most
of the amendments in notification law which the Committee deemed
necessary have been carried into effect. the new form of medical
certificate provides for the supply of a variety of useful information
not required by the original certificate issued by the Local Govern
ment Board in 1889. It is noted as a subject for regret that the law
still exempts from notification the inmates of all places belonging to
Her Majesty the Queen. Thus returns of sickness, not only in the
Royal Palaces, but in all military barracks, and police stations, and in
prisons within the Metropolis, are unobtainable. The Committee
refer to one remaining defect in the Act, resulting from which notifi
cation of an infectious disease originating in a hospital, or other
public institution, is sent to the Medical Officer of Health of the
district from which the sufferer was admitted—it may be weeks or
months previously, instead of being sent to the Medical Officer of
the district in which such public institution is situated. I have had
examples of the kind, in which cases of erysipelas have been reported
to me, from hospitals to which the sufferers had been admitted, long
before, for treatment of other diseases. It is not a serious matter
that the Parish has thus been unfairly debited with cases not properly
belonging to it; but it is regrettable that the Medical Officer of
Health of the district in which the illness breaks out should be left in
ignorance of its occurrence. The return of Notifications given in my
thirteenth four-weekly report for 1891, comprised 26,929 cases, or 407
more than the number given by the Committee (26,522), as set out on
page 69. Three hundred and seventy of these cases represent duplicate
certificates relating to the same persons, and 35 were cases of so-called
" Relapsing Fever " (probably Influenza), of which I had taken no
note in my monthly summaries. Many cases of infectious disease
treated in general hospitals were not notified, the Local Govern
ment Board, as elsewhere explained, holding that, under the
provisions of the Act of 1889, the Medical Officers of such institutions
were exempt from the duty of notifying. This exemption has