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104
TRAVELLING EXPENSES OF RELATIVES VISITING HOSPITAL
PATIENTS. — As in previous years, the County Medical Officer was
able to give financial assistance in 1961 only in very special cases to
enable them to visit relatives who were in hospital; no Ilford persons,
however, applied for assistance under this scheme.
EXAMINATION OF OFFICERS AND SERVANTS. - The following
medical examinations by Essex County Council staff were carried out
during 1961:-
Entrants to County Council Service 43
Other purposes 15
For other Authorities 7
HOME NURSING. — The home nursing service in Ilford is undertaken
by nurses under the supervision of the Superintendent of the Lady
Rayleigh Training Home at Leytonstone but operating from the Branch
Home "Abury House" in Aldborough Road, Ilford.
The work undertaken by home nurses in the Ilford area in 1961
was as follows:-
Cases attended 1,865
Visits paid 55,527
HEALTH EDUCATION. — Dr. G.B. Taylor, Assistant County Medical
Officer, reports:-
"The most important development over the past year has been
the report from the Royal College of Physicians on the effects of
smoking and cancer. Medically speaking there is nothing new in
this report. In Ilford we had been concerned with this problem and
had been tackling it long before such report ever came out. The
over-riding importance of an official report such as this is that it
does give to the public the considered opinions of the most eminent
Medical authorities in the land. This report carried very weighty
views and it would seem that few members of the public are now
unaware of the association between smoking and cancer.
The problems of this epidemic are novel. The epidemic cannot
be tackled in the classical manner by cutting off the offending cause
at its source. If we had a typhoid epidemic in Ilford we could trace
the typhoid germ to its source, which may for instance be a faulty
water supply, and get rid of the typhoid epidemic by purifying the
water. But in this cancer epidemic it is impossible to treat the