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ingredients used were secured and submitted for chemical and
bacteriological examination. The five persons engaged in the
business were given a medical examination and specimens of the
blood and faeces of five of the patients, the staff of the shop and a
relative of one of the employees who was stated to have had an
illness of the same nature were secured and despatched to the
Council's Bacteriologist for examination. A suspicious circumstance
was the fact that the man responsible for making the brawn
had injured his hand with a meat hook on the 15th July and,
although he had his hand bandaged and had treated the wound with
hydrogen peroxide, apparently at the time the patients were
infected the wound was open. The wound was healed on the
27th July when there was a considerable scar about one inch in
diameter. The firm at this time discontinued the making of brawn.
On the 28th July further cases were reported to me, and upon
making enquiries it was ascertained that seven cases had been
reported to the Medical Officer of Health for Tottenham, but no
cases had occurred in any other district. The brawn had been
purchased on five different days and these five days' sales were from
two different makings. From the average number of sales per day
it was estimated that over four thousand customers bought brawn
from these two batches during the five days, and it is possible that
three times that number of persons ate some of it. As only twentyfive
cases of food poisoning were reported, it appeared evident
that the whole of the brawn could not have been infected and that
infection of the meat had occurred subsequent to its preparation,
and further enquiries were based on this assumption.
The Council's Bacteriologist reported that organisms identifiable
as Salmonella Newport had been cultured from the faeces of
two of the patients. Appropriate measures were taken as regards
these persons.
Thirty-two cases of food poisoning were notified during 1937,
and amongst the foods suspected as being the cause were fish, meat,
rhubarb, peas, ice-cream, bread, eggs, pork -pies and shellfish. Only
in five instances was the suspicion of food poisoning proved beyond
reasonable doubt and these cases occurred in one family. There
were three foods suspected as the cause of the poisoning—roast
beef, fried fish and tinned salmon; but careful investigation of all
the circumstances suggested that the beef was the contaminated
food.
Upon examination of the remainder of the meat, an organism
of the food poisoning group, B. Aertrycke, was isolated, and the
same organism was isolated from the stools of each of the persons
affected. These findings left no doubt as to the cause of the illness,
but it was not possible to decide how the meat became infected.
The five patients made a satisfactory recovery within three weeks.