ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the fishing trades, concerned public health personnel's and the bacteriologists, investigations, together with the disease outbreaks. The case study demonstrates the complexities of the political arena within the English public health initiative operated at the turn of the nineteenth century. The growing power of science was, demonstrated by the way in which the fish trades, at first denigrated medical authority, began to co-opt appropriate bacteriological opinion in their own defence. The question of sanitary standards in the shellfish trades was resolved internally, after attempted intervention by a government department but a number of local trade initiatives had conspicuously failed. The drive to reform practices in the shellfish trades came from within medicine, partially backed by the state, to be taken up under pressure of negative consumer input by a reluctant industry which showed a sense of civic responsibility essentially in its own defence. Consumer confidence in the product is self-regulated by the industry.
