SPREAD OF HEPATITIS

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30831, 17 August 1965, Page 9

SPREAD OF HEPATITIS

Lunch-swappers Suspected

Children who swap their sandwiches at school are the Health Department’s prime suspects in the spread of infective hepatitis from one family to another. “It starts with someone who is incubating the disease.” said the medical officer of health (Dr. L. F. Jepson) yesterday, “and in 60 per cent of the cases we have been able to trace the spread through contact from one family to another.

“Food-swapping by children is considered to be one of the , main causes for the spread. However, quite a number of cases of infective hepatitis are contracted in another district and diagnosed here.” Dr. Jepson said that the disease could be prevented by strict attention to personal hygiene, with emphasis on hand-washing. He said that the seven cases reported last week were scattered throughout the Waimairi county, and there was no significance in the fact that they were all in the same county. Sewerage, or lack of it, had definitely not been traced as a cause.

The persons reported to have the disease last week were three boys, two young girls, a girl in her twenties and a man in his sixties. Apart from two cases in one family, there was no connexion between the cases.

The two cases of bacillary dysentery occured in a baby in the city area and in a woman in her forties at Sunnyside Hospital. A girl in her twenties in the city area contracted undulant fever in a laboratory.

There was one case of salmonellosis —a type of food poisoning—contracted by a boy in the city area. It is under investigation. Other notifiable diseases last week were three of opthalmia neonatorum and one of pemphigus neonatorum, all in babies.