Search results

Legionnaires’ Disease is a comparatively new disease with the first cases identified in the United States of America in 1976, where a congress of Legionnaires met in a large hotel and subsequently a number fell ill and 29 died. Within the United Kingdom there has been a number of outbreaks (‘outbreak’ means identification of two or more people having the disease). Hospitals are no exception, being the source of eight outbreaks in the UK (between 1979 and 1984). People attending and visiting hospitals include those most vulnerable to the disease, the old and those suffering from chronic illnesses; thus any hospital‐associated outbreak is the subject of local and national concern. The Stafford outbreak in 1985 affected more people than in any previous hospital outbreak, causing the death of 22 patients. The scale and severity of the incident and its association with a new hospital was the subject of a public inquiry, the first to be held into an outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease in this country.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.