View report page

57
Infectious and other Diseases.
Zymotic Diseases.
The principal zymotic diseases are seven in number, viz. :
small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria (including membranous
croup) whooping-cough, " fever " (including typhus,
enteric or typhoid, and simple or continued) and diarrhœa ; and
the zymotic death-rate is calculated from the total deaths from
these diseases. The zymotic death-rate may be accepted,
within certain limits, as an index of the sanitary condition of
a community, and the statistics for the Borough of Battersea
in 1907 will bear favourable comparison with those of former
years.
In the Borough of Battersea during 1907, there were
registered from the principal zymotic diseases 243 deaths,
giving a zymotic corrected death-rate of 1.33 per 1,000 ; the
corrected rate for London being 1.42, varying in the different
Metropolitan Boroughs from .51 in Hampstead to 3.01 in
Shoreditch. The zymotic death-rates vary also for the three
registration sub-districts, East Battersea 1.5 per 1,000, NorthWest
Battersea 1.8 per 1,000, South-West Battersea .72 per
1,000. North-West Battersea shows the highest, and SouthWest
Battersea the lowest, a difference explainable from the
crowding and absence of proper means of home isolation and
nursing in North-West and East Battersea as against the
latter district, in which the housing accommodation and
general standard of comfort is on the whole superior.
Similar conclusions are obtainable by comparing the
death-rates and zymotic incidences for the different Wards of
the Borough, as shown in the table on page 59, from which it
will be seen that of the nine Wards, Winstanley shows the