§ Mrs. GormanTo ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the operation of the system of infectious disease reporting set up under the Local Government Act 1974.
§ Mr. FreemanThe statutory basis for the system of infectious disease reporting in England and Wales is now contained in the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and the Public Health (Infectious Diseases) Regulations 1988.
Medical practitioners are required to notify cases of certain infectious disease to local authority proper officers who are required to pass data on to other bodies including district health authorities and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Serious outbreaks of disease and individual cases of particular diseases must also be reported to the chief medical officer. In practice surveillance of infectious disease in the population draws upon various sources of data apart from these notifications, for example school sickness records, general practitioner reports, laboratory reports, hospital data, death registration and local surveys.
We announced last July that we accepted the general principles advanced by the chief medical officer's report on "Public Health in England" and that we would be taking a number of steps to carry forward its recommendations. To this end the Department has set up a review of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. We will be issuing a consultation paper later this year.