Abstract
AT a meeting of the Section of Epidemiology and State Medicine of the Royal Society of Medicine on March 28, Surgeon-Rear-Admiral S. F. Dudley and Surgeon-Commander W. G. C. FitzPatrick read a paper on epidemiology in the Royal Navy, especially as regards the use of miniature radiography. They stated that tuberculosis is an occasional disease of sailors. Although its ravages were much greater in the last century, there has been no decline in its prevalence in the present century, in spite of energetic measures to prevent it. This is due to the unpre-ventable degree of overcrowding which must exist in warships and the presence of numerous unsuspected cases of open pulmonary tuberculosis. Measures designed to weed out these sources of infection have hitherto failed; little effect on total incidence can be expected from the X-ray examination of recruits or limited numbers of contacts. Periodic X-ray examination of the total force by the usual technique is considered impracticable, therefore the more rapid and economic technique of mass miniature radiography has been instituted. Some preliminary results on the first twenty thousand examinations were given and the organization of the first Naval Miniature Radiographic Department was described.
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Tuberculosis in the Navy. Nature 147, 413 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147413a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147413a0