Sessional_Paper_1907 — Page 565

187 (7)

All processes of cleansing and disinfection and all other Plague preventive measures have been thoroughly discussed by the Board, in the past, before being put into practice and the Committees of the Board have supervised the details (a 1901 Committee consisted of Mr. OSBORNE, the Medical Officer of Health and inyself).

Paragraph 156.-No facts are adduced in support of the lurid picture drawn in this paragraph. The comparative absence of specific complaints lead one to believe that the general cleansing and disinfection have on the whole been carried out with as little inconvenience to the public as in the circumstances might reasonably be expected.

10.-Paragraph 158.-The Commissioners assert that too little attention has been given to the importance of enlisting the co-operation of the Chinese in combating plague, and they allude to the frequency with which dead bodies are cast into the streets as evidence of the repugnance of the population to present methods of dealing with plague.

This assertion will hardly carry conviction in the face of the following facts:-

(a.) In deference to Chinese susceptibilities a general cleansing of Chinese dwellings by the inbabitauts under supervision of the Sanitary Authorities has been instituted and is smoothly and successfully carried out year after year. (b.) Disinfection by Sanitary Officials is limited to the floor in which a case of infectious disease has occurred, the disinfection of the other floors in the house being allowed to be carried out by the inmates themselves.

(c.) Individuals sick of plague are permitted to leave the Colony for their homes in China, and bodies dead of plague are allowed to be taken out of the Colony for burial in China.

(d.) The Tung Wa Hospital has since the first outbreak of Plague in 1894, with the exception of the one plague season in 1896, been allowed to maintain its own Plague Hospital, and it has since been allowed to establish District Plague Hospitals in various parts of the Colony.

(e.) Similarly the inhabitants of Kowloon City have been permitted to maintain

their own Plague Hospital.

(f.) With a view to mitigate the deplorable practice of casting dead bodies into the streets the Tung Wa Hospital has been allowed to open in various parts of Victoria and Kowloon dispensaries where cases of plague and other infectious disease can be reported, and the services of a Chinese Licentiate of the Hong- kong College of Medicine for Chinese can be obtained to visit the case, report it, permit its removal to one of the Native Hospitals (if it is a case of plague) and attend at the subsequent disinfection of the premises. At these dis- pensaries, too, a reward of One Dollar is paid for each dead body of a child under the age of 4 years brought to the dispensary.

(g.) No Chinese sick of plague is removed against his will to the Government Plague Hospital. All are given the option of being treated in the Govern- ment Hospital or in one of the Native Hospitals.

In spite of all these concessions the dumping of dead bodies in the streets continues unabated and shows no diminution as to numbers.

It must be remembered that besides the dislike to disinfection of their dwellings, which appears to continue no matter by whom the disinfection is carried out, the poorer classes of Chinese will cast out bodies to save the cost of burial and in the case of young children to avoid coffining the dead. For it is considered unlucky to put a young child in a coffin, the idea being that if buried in a coffin it will not live long in the new life to which Chinese believe all dead will be re-born.

With these many facilities for dealing with cases of plague the suggestion to allow plague patients to remain in overcrowded Chinese tenements appears hardly reasonable, and I may point out that even in Sir H. BLAKE's experimental block this course was not adopted. In the earlier stages of Sir H. BLAKE's experiment plague cases were allowed to remain in the house in which they occurred but the other inmates of the house were removed elsewhere. Later when cases became more frequent a hospital was established in connection with the block to which plague cases were removed.