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308 open air. Certainly, should the child fall ill the conditions are highly unsuitable both for nursing and for adequate medical care, and early removal to hospital is the only remedy. That the children take part in the work of the barge is not surprising ; but there is no reason to assume that the bargee, who (apart from a notable but possibly mythical vocabulary) does not differ from other men, is likely to make his children wretched by overworking them. The difficulty of educating these children certainly calls for thought. A canal-boat school, as Mr. Harry Gosling explained when moving the second reading of the Bill, has all the disadvantages of a canal boat and few of the advantages of a school. The children attending would be educated among themselves with no possibility of mixing with other children, and the damp quarters, absence of playgrounds, and of sanitary arrangements make such a school most undesirable. Even so, it seems a drastic measure to try to combat these disadvantages by making it illegal for children to be on such boats. If this is done the mother will be forced to set up house on shore with the children, and family life will at once come to an end. Though it has been suggested that the absence of women from the boats would entail addition to the crews and hence increase in cost of transport, Mr. Gosling is of the opinion that recon- struction of canal boats should prevent this. He went on to describe the difficulties of childbirth on a canal boat, with inadequate preparations and in the presence of most of the family. Granted that this is extremely undesirable it occurs with great frequency in any slum district, and is not peculiar to barge life. The problem of overcrowding is fundamental, and not to be cured by removing children from barges. Canal boats used for the removal of house refuse, however, are certainly an unsuitable environment for the up- bringing of children, and the public should be able to learn what proportion of canal boats are used for this purpose and whether the same boats perform this function continuously or intermittently. That children do live on such barges at present is proved by the reports of the Ministry of Health inspectors ; the report of the Public Cleansing Committee also discusses the matter, and recommendations were made by the inspectors that children should not be allowed to live on refuse barges. While no medical man would fail to support such a suggestion, many will hesitate to agree to the wider application implying the de-barging of all these children. ____ : PSITTACOSIS IN GERMANY. FURTHER information is now available about some of the German cases of psittacosis to which our Berlin correspondent referred on Jan. 25th. Writing from Hamburg, Prof. C. Heglerl describes two small outbreaks, one of which involved three members of a family which traded in animals and the other some of the staff and patients of the St. Georg Hospital. The clinical picture in all the nine cases was, he says, surprisingly uniform, and included pneumonia. The bacteriological findings were negative, although a special search was made for Bacillus psittacosis, and Hegler thinks that the disease may be due to a filtrable virus acting, perhaps, in combination with bacilli such as pneumococci and streptococci which happen to be present. The isolation of such a virus was reported in our last issue by Bedson, Western, and Simpson. Prof. H. Embden and Prof. G. Adamy2 describe 14 cases observed in the general hospital at Barmbeck. All the patients manifested symptoms similar to those of the English cases, and the bacterio- logical findings were all negative. Dr. G. Elkeles3 contributes an account of an outbreak last November in a Berlin household, a member of which had brought back from the Upper Amazon four birds, three of which were very ill. With one exception, all those 1 Deut. med. Woch., Jan. 24th, p. 148. 2 Münch, med. Woch., Jan. 24th, p. 140. 3 Ibid., p. 139. living in the house fell sick ; two died and three- narrowly escaped with their lives. A friend to whom one of the sick birds was given also fell ill, but the family which received the sound bird showed no. signs of illness. All the patients suffered from severe cerebral symptoms and circulatory disturbance, together with an atypical form of pneumonia without sputum. In another small outbreak the infection attacked six persons who had come into contact with a parrot. Cultures from the organs of the dead patients gave no data of etiological significance, and investigation on the dead birds also produced no result. Elkeles does not believe that B.. psittacosis has anything to do with the disease. THE CONTROL OF BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS. Dr. George Hilton gives a valuable account of what has been done and is being attempted in Canada to control bovine tuberculosis. The first step in 1896 was the offer of free testing of herds with tuberculin, an offer which met with little response. In 1903 an Act was passed making it compulsory to place an identification mark (a punched T) upon all reacting cattle. No opposition is recorded, a matter of interest since such action is a very debatable and controversial matter in this country. The supervised herd plan was adopted in 1905, but made little progress. In 1914 municipalities were required to limit their milk-supply to officially tested herds, a procedure which broke down in practice owing to the refusal of many dairymen to submit to the testing of their herds, while the complaisant could not provide an adequate supply of milk. This was got over by allowing untested herds to supply if the milk was pasteurised. These measures, if their actual results were small, were certainly instructive and thus enabled the Federal Department of Agriculture to introduce the accredited herd plan in 1919. Under this plan, much used in the United States, the aim is to eradicate tuberculosis in individual herds and then maintain them free from this disease. The testing and retesting of cattle is done free of charge, and compensation is paid for slaughtered reactors upon a fixed scale. On March 31st, 1929, there were approximately 4000 fully accredited herds apart from 2000 herds in process of becoming accredited. Ancillary to this, the restricted area plan was adopted in 1922. Provided at least two-thirds of the cattle owners in any specified area sign a special petition, and this is approved by the government of the province concerned, the plan is put into operation. The object of the plan is to test all herds in a defined area as expeditiously as possible, with a view to locating the infected herds, and steps are then taken to eradicate tuberculosis in these herds, compensation being paid for slaughtered reacting animals. Com-- pensation is only given after satisfactory disinfection of the premises. Retesting is, of course, necessary, and steps are taken to prevent the introduction of infected animals. The area plan is considered the more economical, and it promotes better housing and other- sanitary conditions for the cattle. When Hilton’s paper was written there were eight restricted areas with approximately 700,000 cattle. In general, these two plans have made great progress and about one-ninth of all the cattle in the Dominion have been tested at least once, while over 114,000 reactors have been slaughtered. There is an increasing demand for tubercle-free cattle and milk. It may be pointed out that the above schemes are only practicable in areas with a low incidence of bovine tuberculosis. Hilton does not give the average incidence in Canada, merely remarking that it is comparatively low, but the procedures are nearly identical with those employed in the United States where the percentage varies from only 3 to 5 per cent. In England our rather imperfect data suggest that it is not less than 40 per cent. and in many areas. 1 Jour. of Dairy Research, 1929, i., 58.
