View report page

100
children and their mothers responded extremely well and in a much
shorter time than either children of an older age or parents seen
on their own. There is no doubt that the mother of a very young child
has far less rigidity in her personality and is more able to make changes
because of her maternal feelings than at any other time in her life.
Therefore, psychiatric work with this age group is possibly the most
valuable that can be done from the point of view of public health and
preventive medicine, particularly as modern scientific work emphasises
that these years are the important formative years for the child's
personality. It would seem, therefore, from the economic point of view,
that work of this nature produces a far better return for the expenditure
involved than any other in the psychiatric field. Unhappily, only an
insignificant number of pre-school children can be seen in the ordinary
way at the Hornsey and Tottenham centres and it must be said that the
lack of psychiatric help readily available for them is a most serious
defect in the present service.'
Tuberculosis in School Children
During the past year an attenpt has been made to devise a plan for epidemiological
action when a case of tuberculosis is discovered in a school.
Notified cases are classified as infectious or non-infectious. If the
case is infectious and the contacts are over the age of 14 years, a chest
X-ray is advised. If the case is infectious and the contacts are under 14
years, a p atch test is given and if the result is positive an X-ray is
advised together with a search for undiagnosed infectious home contacts;
should the patch test be negative no further action is taken.
When a case of non infectious tuberculosis is discovered in a school
child, the source of infection is sought in the child's own family, but if two
or more children attending the same school are notified as tuberculous or if
no infecting contact is found at home, arrangements are made for epidemiological
investigation of the school as if an infectious case had been notified.
The following epidemiological investigations were carried out during
1953:-
Tollington Gremmar School
389 boys and 24 staff were X rayed following the discovery of a case of
open tuberculosis in a 17 year old boy attending the school. As a result of
the X-rays one boy is under observation at the Chest Clinic though he is not a
notifiable case of tuberculosis. It is unlikely that this boy's infection
was acquired in a school because two older brothers are suffering from the
disease.