Guess Whats Coming With Dinner?
When it comes to inspecting mosquito breeding grounds in the city’s swamplands like the Tinicum Marsh in southwest Philadelphia and the League Island Golf Course, the department is really up the communicable disease creek. They do not have one single entomologist-insect specialist-on the payroll. As one supervisor put it, "All we have is one man who is pretty familiar with flying insects and the diseases they can spread. When a specimen comes in [someone once mailed a live black widow spider to the department], he tries to match it up with one of the bug pictures in the encyclopedia of insects. He hardly ever misses." This is roughly equivalent to official Cub Scout procedure.
When the department’s bug-man does blow one, the entomologist from the Navy Yard is usually on call (as a personal favor to the department) to bail out the City of Philadelphia. If the bug-man fails and the Navy Yard man is out to sea, then the people at the Health Department just have to hope that on any given night the exotic mosquitoes are not very hungry.
Another essential function of the department is the review and approval of all blueprints for any structure or kitchen facility that will handle food. The man in charge of evaluating the plans is not an engineer but he has had to make himself into a facsimile expert on the safe and sanitary design and layout of food handling facilities. The people from Licenses & Inspections are charged with regulating structural requirements and the Health Department official just worries about the eventual workability of the designs that are built. In this, as in other areas, the health inspectors are expected to make do with whatever expertise — no matter how little it might be — they possess.
Requisitions for vital equipment take an eternity to fill and even accurate forms and files for the administrative personnel are hard to come by. While the manpower shortage among field personnel is acute, the number of administrative employees in support of positions is ludicrously small. With the amount of paperwork involved in each inspection tour, the sanitarians could make use of a secretarial pool, but unfortunately the entire milk and food section of the Department of Health is staffed by just one fulltime secretary. Frequently, section chiefs and department heads must answer their own phones, take their own messages and run their own errands.
The inspectors dream about a time in the distant future when a computer-data system or microfilm file would streamline their operation and allow accurate recording of inspections and re-inspections. The way things are now, everything at the department is done by hand and the methods for researching are the most primitive imaginable. The laboratory at the Department of Health is, adequate up to a point, but beyond that little in the way of scientific investigation is possible. The equipment available is simply not sophisticated enough to handle in-depth chemical analysis and biological classification.
In a sense, the bush-league image that haunts Philadelphia is too flattering a picture to describe the conditions under which Health Department employees are forced to work.
