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24
Infectious and other Diseases.
Zymotic Diseases.
The principal zymotic diseases are seven in number, viz.,
small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria (including membranous croup),
whooping cough,"fever" (including typhus, enteric or typhoid, and
simple or continued), and diarrhoea. 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 will be found to show on the whole a very satisfactory
record, as compared with former years.
In the Borough of Battersea during 1909 there were registered
from the principal zymotic diseases 237 deaths, giving a
corrected zymotic death-rate of 1.27 per 1,000, the corrected rate
for the County of London being 1.31, varying in the different
Metropolitan Boroughs from .52 in Hampstead to 2.74 in Bermondsey.
The zymotic death-rates vary considerably for the three
sub-districts into which, for registration purposes, the Borough
is divided. Thus in the East district the rate was 1.94, in the
North-West district, 1.47, while in South-West Battersea the
rate was only .22 per 1,000. As in past years, the less sanitary
areas of the Borough show a much higher death-rate, accounted
for by the crowding and absence of home isolation in the two
first-named districts, as compared with the latter, in which the
housing accommodation and general standard of living is on the
whole much superior.
Similar conclusions are to be drawn from a comparison of
the death-rates from the chief zymotic diseases in the different
Wards of the Borough, as shown in the table on page 25.
The number of deaths registered from the chief zymotic
diseases during 1909 was 113 fewer than the average for the ten
years 1899-1908.