§ Sir WILLIAM BULLasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been called to 115W the report of the visiting ophthalmic surgeon to the ophthalmic schools of the Metropolitan Asylums Board at Brentwood and Swanley, and to the statement in that report that the number of trachomatous children admitted to the schools mentioned was 115 in 1906, fell to 82 in 1907, and had risen in 1910 to 122; to the further statement in the report that in the High Wood School, Brentwood, one nurse contracted the disease of trachoma during the year 1909; and to the fact that trachoma is so extremely rare as to be almost unknown as an indigenous disease, while the chronicity of the complaint makes cure a matter not of days or weeks, but of months and years; and whether, in view of the danger of contagion affecting children in schools in London and elsewhere, His Majesty's Government intend to take steps to check the importation of trachoma into this country by aliens arriving in non-immigrant ships?
§ Mr. CHURCHILLI have referred to the Reports indicated for the years 1909 and 1910, and I find that, while the figures quoted in the earlier part of the question are taken from them correctly so far as they go, and the statement as to the length of time required for a cure is true, the reports afford no support for the inferences suggested in the latter part of the question. I may point out that while the 122 cases of trachoma in 1910 form a slightly larger proportion of the total admissions in the schools than did the number eighty-two in 1907, they form a considerably smaller proportion than the number 115 in 1907, and are much less both actually and proportionately than the numbers 292 and 200 in the years 1903 and 1904. Further, the largest number of the 122 cases came from Southwark, which is not one of the areas into which newly arrived aliens mostly go, and in which there were fewer aliens, according to the Census of 1901, than in any other Metropolitan Borough, except Bermondsey and Camberwell. At the same time, the question of the opportunity which there may be for aliens suffering from trachoma to come into this country on non-immigrant ships has always been closely watched by my Department; and, as I indicated in my speech on the Second Reading of the Aliens Bill on the 28th of April, I am considering whether and in what circumstances I may properly exercise my power of altering the definition of immigrant ship with the object of rendering the exclusion of disease still more effective.