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16
As I have previously mentioned there was an outbreak of
diphtheria and malignant sore throat in various parts of the
District, causing 61 deaths, 49 of which was certified as being
from diphtheria. There were altogether 71 cases reported, of
which 38 occurred in the same number of houses, 20 in 10
houses, 9 in 3 houses, and 4 in 1 house, so that the disease was
confined to one case in a house in a little more than one-half of
the whole. This shows the disease to be decidedly infectious,
and points to the necessity for the removal of the sufferers to a
hospital. There is, however, this difficulty as regards the
exeroise of such a power by the Sanitary Department, that we
rarely receive any notifications of the existence of this disease,
exoept from the Death Register, or when a second case has
occurred in the same house. There is also another drawback to
removal, viz. the rapidity of the disease, which often renders
removal unsafe for the patient a few hours after its onset.
Three cases were removed, viz. 1 to the London Hospital, and 2
to the Fever Hospital at Homerton, and they are also received
at the London Fever Hospital, so that there is no difficulty on that
point. In most instances when two or more cases occurred in
a house, the spread of the disease was caused by direct infection.
Thus at a house in the Broughton Road, a child, aged 5 years,
first contracted the disease, and the mother who attended the
child caught it a few days afterwards. At another house in the
Ballance Road, the grandmother who nursed a child 8 years
old, took the disease and died. The elder of two brothers
residing in Kingsland caught the disease from the younger, and
the same is said to have occurred with two sisters in the Enfield
Road. The mother of two children in Tottenham Road, who
nursed them, was infected and died 10 days after the death of
the child who first contracted the disease. There were other
similar cases, which need no special mention.
The disease was not prevalent in the early part of the year,
as it was not until some cases occurred in the Tottenham Road
Board School, that it became at all frequent. Two deaths