It wasn’t until after WWII that the BCG vaccine against TB first became available in the most advanced medical centers—-- and it was years later in impoverished western Ireland.
In this era, even for privileged TB patients who got the best of food in the most pristine and costly alpine TB sanatoria, 50% of patients were dead within five years.
Antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin, Aureomycin, and tetracycline were not available for prescription until the 1950′s. Before this time, 60-80% of the people infected with pneumonia died, usually within a week-10 days. (It was only with the introduction of penicillin that the mortality rate for pneumonia dropped to 1 -5%).
American Medicine Volume 2, p. 290, estimates that in the pre-antibiotic era, one seventh (1/7) of all deaths worldwide were caused by tuberculosis. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran many articles on the serious requirement that TB sufferers be kept apart from the uninfected population, and that their bodies be disposed of as soon as possible after death in order to prevent recurring epidemics.
Church-run charitable facilities were precisely the places to which these unfortunate sick children were being consigned. Is it any wonder that the death rate was high, and the burial of bodies done quickly without individual caskets and graves?
Thousands of babies and children passed through institutions like the Bon Secours Home. Indeed many were brought there because their parents knew that was the only place they could receive even basic palliative care without infecting everyone in their family households.
So people in Ireland whose little children were desperately ill — and who had no means of treating them — left them at churches, convents and orphanages, thus continuously re-introducing infectious diseases into Homes caring for orphaned/abandoned children.
Many such institutions attempted to protect the healthy babies born in the Homes, by arranging for their adoption as quickly as they could. Thus the next “scandal” charged against Catholic charitable organizations: the awful, heartless adoption of Irish babies by American families (Philomena!) .
Evidence suggests the conclusion that Bon Secours and similar Homes were not barbaric negligent pest-houses, but baby-saving missions, doing heart-breaking but heroic work in a time of desperation.
In any case, the causes of death listed in the story are taken from the files of a "local health board," and yet there is no indication whatsoever that the orphanage was cited for any kind of violations. That should tell any reasonable reader that the children likely entered the facility in a state of “neglect and malnourishment.” That some of them were not saved in a cramped institution wherein many of the children suffered with communicable diseases is no surprise.
The surprise is that so many thousands survived.
These babies weren't buried. They were literally flushed down the toilet.