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The Health of Barking
As a matter of fact, the other day a very knowledgeable person came to me,
pleading with me to take up the possibility of vermin inspections to be carried out
in factories similar to those carried out in schools, and quite frankly I did not like
to entertain recommending such a possibility, but I do find it difficult to find
sufficient grounds for refusing to do so.
As I have said elsewhere, it is what I term as the "reservoirs" of infestation
which are not only found amongst tousle-headed, bedraggled, incompetent housewives,
who, often times should be pitied rather than blamed, but amongst smart
people who, often having spent more money than they can afford, imprison their
hair in a snood, refraining from brushing or washing it so that, like the wigs men
used to wear in olden days, their wonderful hair-do becomes, sad to relate, the abode
of a major infestation.
There are to-day, I believe, a lesser number of people with actual lice in their
hair, but there are still many people who are painstaking enough to remove the
lice, but are not painstaking enough to remove nits, so that they become what
may be looked upon as perpetual "reservoirs."
Ophthalmia Neonatorum.
Elsewhere I have written about ophthalmia neonatorum, pointing out it is a
long word and that I don't like long words where there is plain English to take
its place. In this case, however, there is no other word. What ophthalmia
neonatorum means is that there is inflammation of the eyes in a newly-born child,
and it would be too much to say this every time you wanted to speak of ophthalmia
neonatorum, but here I would like to tell of an incident, when John came up to
me in most evident distress.
He had been reading about child welfare and somehow or another he had got
hold of a book which was twenty or thirty years old, and, of course, thought that
it was up-to-date. He wanted to know how he could be sure his child wasn't
suffering from ophthalmia neonatorum, and I was very happy to tell him to go
home and forget all about it.
Although there were no less than 1,461 live births last year, there were only
three cases of ophthalmia neonatorum. The point is that John's book wasn't
at fault years ago, because this used to be a very devastating disease, but improved
midwifery and improved child welfare, amongst other things, have almost brought
to an nd what was once a frequent cause of congenital blindness.
Pemphigus Neonatorum.
There is one thing which John never came to me about, and that is pemphigus
neonatorum. This is a disease in newly-born children and causes their poor little
bodies to become more or less covered with blemishes. We did not have one
case during 1948; in fact we have only had 10 cases during the last ten years, and
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