Brighouse & Rastrick Gazette. — 1887-12-10 (Brighouse, West Yorkshire, England)

VACCINATION AND SMALL-PDX.  The 16th annual report of the Local Government Board,issued on Monday, contains the report of the medical officer for 1886. This deals, among other matters, with the experience of the department as to vaccination in England and Wales. Complaints of injury occurring from vaccination, public and private, have been received during the year from five sources and had reference to 14 vaccinations. Investigation of the facts has been made by the inspectors of the department in every instance. Of the 14 alleged cases of injury the person said to have been injured could not be heard of in two; in others the ailment was obviously unconnected with vaccination. The cases which had had more or less of relation to vaccination were all of erysipelas, and six fatal cases were inquired about. Throe of these occurring in the Sudbury Union formed the subject of special report by Dr. Airy. They turned out to be altogether independent the one of the other, except for their occurrence at the same time in a neighbourhood where erysipelas was considerably prevalent. In a memorandum submitted to the department last January b. Dr. Bridges, Local Government Board Inspector for the metropolitan district, the exceptional amount of small-pox existing around metropolitan small-pox hospitals is recognised as matter of certainty, but ' the significance of the fact is disputed. It is said that other places suffer from small-pox as much as, even more than, the immediate neighbourhood of these hospitals; and the spread of small-pox round Fulham Hospital on two of the more conspicuous occasions is regarded as being merely a part, a specimen as it were, "of a general rise taking place at the same time throughout the metropolis." The memorandum does not take account of other smallpox hospitals in the metropolis, or note the fact that the rise which is spoken of as " general " was in truth in large measure special upon the parishes that had nearest concern with those other small-pox hospitals. A series of chapters written by Mr. Power upon the experience of London registration districts since 1875, need only to be studied by the light of the Fulham experiences to give a presumption (apart from any afforded by local health officer's reports) that those experiences of Fulham have been repeated at Hampstead, at Homerton, at Stockwell, and at Deptford, at each epidemic period ; a presumption, namely, that small-pox infection has habitually been distributed from each of those hospitals over considerable areas, most conspicuously at the commencement of epidemic periods -, with a further presumption that this distribution has greatly influenced the small-pox mortality of whole registration districts ; while incidental illustrations are not wanting of peculiar excess in the incidence of small-pox upon portions of districts nearest to the several hospitals.  Elizabeth Burns, a married woman, of Dublin, stands remanded on a charge of having murdered Eliza Hynes, aged 60. A Cabinet Council was held at the Foreign Office on Tuesday. Lord .Ashbourne, who had come from Dublin specially to attend, was the first Minister to join Lord Salisbury, who, with Mr. Balfour had previously arrived from Hatfield. All the members were present except Sir Michael Hicks Beach. Mr. Smith arrived from Doncaster shortly after his colleagues had assembled.  Sir Henry Parkes, the Premier of New South Wales, in reply to the protest forwarded by Mr. Gillies the Victorian Prime Minister, on behalf of Queensland and South Australia against the proposal to change the name of New South Wales to Australia," states that it is impossible for a colony with a century of honourable record to take a brand-new name, and it is tieerefore compelled to reassume the title of " Australia."