PARLIAMENTARY POWERS 
FOR THE SANITARY SUPERVISION AND CONTROL OF ICE-CREAM 
MANUP^ACTURE* 
By E. PETRONELL MANBY, M.D., D.P.H. 
Assistant Medical Officer of Health, Liverpool, Lecturer in Public Health, 
University College Liverpool 
That the manufacture and storage of ice-cream is, as a rule, carried out under very 
insanitary conditions is no new fact. The question of interest to Medical Officers of Health is 
how these conditions, so prejudicial to health, can be improved. The subject has been discussed 
on more than one occasion at one society or another, and resolutions condemning the present state 
of affairs and urging the granting of controlling powers to Health Authorities have been passed. 
As far as I am aware, however, Liverpool is at present the only Local Authority in England 
which has obtained such Parliamentary powers. Perhaps, therefore, it may be of some interest to 
you to hear what those powers are, and our experience of the first year's working under them. 
Several outbreaks of typhoid fever, apparently due to contaminated ice-cream, have been 
reported of late years. 
A full account of such an outbreak appeared in Dr. Hope's Annual Report on the Health 
of Liverpool for 1897, and I will only very briefly mention the points here. 
All the patients were children of school age, and all attended the same school. 
Possible sources of infection at the homes of the patients were excluded, and attention was 
of course at once directed to conditions of the school, but everything was found satisfactory there. 
The period of illness of the various patients indicated the end of the first week in 
September as the probable date of infection. 
Inquiry elicited the fact that a village fair had been held in Knotty Ash, a suburb of 
Liverpool, on September 6th and 7th, and that every one of the children suflFering from typhoid 
had visited the fair. An ice-cream and chip potato vendor was present, and all the children but 
three admitted that they had partaken of his ice-cream. Of these three two had eaten only chip 
potatoes and no ice-cream, and the other was too young and too ill to give any account of its 
proceedings. 
It was then discovered that two children living at New Brighton {i.e., some miles from 
Liverpool on the other side of the Mersey), but who had been at the Knotty Ash fair and eaten 
the ice-cream there, were lying ill at home with typhoid fever, and a few days later identical 
information was received with reference to a school boy at Denbigh. 
* Reprinlerl from the 'Journnl of the Sanitary Institute,* vol. xx, part iv. 
* jr 
