6 DECEMBER 1957, Page 18

SEWAGE DISPOSAL

SIR,—One of the pleasures of my week is Taper's `Westminster Commentary,' but I was disappointed that in last Friday's instalment he referred to Mr. Norman Dodds's request for a minimum meat con- tent for sausages as 'the only remotely intelligent, interesting or important question of the week.'

While relishing his racy estimate of present-day sausage contents, I wish he had also referred to what we, on Municipal Engineering, consider to be the most important questions of.the week, i.e., those asked by Dr. Reginald Bennett and Mrs. Harriet Slater about the disposal of crude sewage into Britain's rivers and coastal waters.

When the polio-from-sewage scare story broke last August, your paper airily dismissed the matter in a couple of lines and in doing this I think you were wrong.

Since the last war the enormous increase in the number of new houses built and in the holiday popu- lations of our seaside towns has thrown an intoler- able load on the country's sewage disposal system and this has resulted in disgusting pollution of many rivers and off-shore waters.

The provision of new sewage works and the modernisation and extension of old ones have become urgently necessary and any Member of Parliament who tries to get a little more money spent on these projects is doing valuable work towards safeguarding public health.—Yours faithfully, D. HAMILTON Editor, Municipal Engineering 4 Clement's Inn, WC2