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Each Commission is composed of members who are particularly interested in the subject with which the
Commission deals, though the rule is that any member of the Permanent Committee may attend a meeting
of the Commissions and take part in the debates.
These Commissions, and a brief account of the work they do, are as follows:—
1. The Quarantine Commission.—This Commission deals with all matters arising out of the interpretation
and application of the International Sanitary Conventions.
You will recognise some of its work when I tell you that it recently drew up the International
Agreement for the abolition of Bills of Health and Consular visas thereon; it was also responsible for the
International arrangement for the sending of wireless quarantine messages by ships approaching a port,
and the International arrangement whereby Port Health Authorities transmit to the Health Authorities
of other countries, by the most rapid means possible, the names and addresses of passengers, travelling
overland, who have disembarked from a ship on which one or other of the five convention diseases, plague,
cholera, typhus fever, small-pox or yellow fever is present or suspected to be present.
The Commission usually has a number of complaints to consider, generally on the application of
Article 28 of the Convention which, as you know, deals with the periodic inspection of vessels for the
reduction of their rat population, and the issue of certificates of fumigation or exemption from fumigation.
It issues a report of its discussions at the end of each meeting and no doubt many of you will have read
these reports, extracts from which are published, from time to time, in the Weekly Record of the Ministry
of Health.
2. The Yelloxv Fever Commission.—This Commission was set up some years ago to review the important
developments which were taking place in the detection, control and above all the prevention of the spread
of yellow fever.
As you all know, the brilliant discoveries of Stokes which culminated in the experimental transmission
of yellow fever to the India monkey, the Macacas rhesus, opened up a vast field of investigation into the
properties of the yellow fever virus, of measures for its detection and for the prevention of its spread.
The disease is, at the moment, going through a curious phase in its history. Classical yellow fever
has given place of importance to the so-called Jungle Yellow Fever which is not conveyed by the stegomia
mosquito.
The so-called "mouse protection test" for detecting immunity in humans, and the viscerotome for
taking specimens of infected liver of fatal cases, have shown a wide and unexpected distribution of the
yellow fever virus throughout Brazil and in Central Africa, even as far east as the Nile.
In the meantime, thanks to the brilliant work of Sawyer and his colleagues in the yellow fever
laboratories of the Rockefeller Foundation at New York, a fixed attenuated virus has been obtained which,
when inoculated in minute quantities, seems to confer a strong and lasting immunity to the disease in humans
without any accompanying risk.
Advantage of this has been taken to immunise during this year over a million inhabitants of the rural
areas of Brazil, and a similar policy in being contemplated for Central Africa.
These and kindred subject matter are the subject of discussion and report by the Yellow Fever
Commission.
3. The Cholera Commission.—Cholera is no longer of much interest to this country nor probably to
Western Europe, but its study is of fundamental importance to the Middle and Far East.
Thanks to the researches of Taylor and his collaborators in India on the properties of pathogenic
cholera vibrios and of non-pathogenic water vibrios, we are on the threshold of an entirely new conception
of the epidemiology of cholera, which still claims its tens of thousands of victims annually in India, and is
an ever present scourge in the Far East.
At the instigation of the Cholera Commission a new specific toxin has been perfected by Taylor in
India and by Gardner and Bruce White in London, for the diagnosis of true cases of Cholera.
The highly selective serum prepared from this toxin will be of great value in distinguishing true from
pseudo cholera and eventually, it is hoped, in defining the role, if any, played by the so-called healthy
cholera carrier.
The Cholera Commission studies these researches and recommends such administrative action as can
be translated from them.
4. The Pilgrimage Commission.—This Commission deals with all matters concerning the safety, welfare
and health of Moslem Pilgrims journeying to and from Mecca and with the practical measures designed to
ensure the healthiness of Saudi Arabia and of other pilgrimage countries susceptible to the invasion of
cholera, plague, smallpox and other epidemic diseases that might arise from this annual mass movement
of some 100,000 people.
The Permanent Committee of the Paris Office at its last session decided, at the request of the
Saudi Arabian Government, to undertake a review of the existing pilgrimage clauses of the 1926 Convention
with a view to the amelioration of quarantine measures at present imposed upon pilgrims, seeing that
cholera, nor indeed any serious epidemic disease, has not appeared among the pilgrims for a great many
years and is not likely to reappear so long as the countries of origin continue to immunise pilgrims, before
departure, against cholera and smallpox.