With the reporting of four new cases of smallpox in East Durham during the past week, danger of a serious outbreak of the disease has become more probable, Dr. J.H. Epperson, superintendent of the health department declared Friday.
In the past three weeks seven new cases of the disease have been reported, all from the Angier avenue community in East Durham, but of persons in separate families.
“If the smallpox should break out in the East Durham school,” Dr. Epperson said, “it would find from 90 to 95 per cent of the pupils unvaccinated, and that would mean that scores of them would contract the disease. As there has never been compulsory vaccination in the school, an outbreak of smallpox would prove serious.”
Dr. Epperson pointed out that at the present time there is a young East Durham school girl suffering from the disease. Whether she left the school before the smallpox had reached the contagious stage is not determined, but the case was not diagnosed until about a week after she became ill.
The health department is doing all it can to vaccinate all who have been exposed to those developing smallpox during the past several weeks. Parents are urged to protect their children by having them vaccinated before the likelihood of an outbreak is increased.
From page 2 of the Durham Morning Herald, Saturday, January 19, 1924
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