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25
Infectious and other Zymotic 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 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 in 1910 will be found on inspection to establish a record
low death-rate from these diseases during the year under report.
In the Borough of Battersea during 1910 there were registered
from the principal zymotic diseases 209 deaths, giving a corrected
zymotic death-rate of 1.11 per 1,000, the corrected death-rate for
the County of London being 1.14, varying in the different Metropolitan
Boroughs from .46 in Hampstead to 2.44 in Bermondsey.
The zymotic death-rate varies considerably for the three subdistricts
into which for registration purposes the Borough is divided.
Thus in the East District the rate was 1.26, in the North-West
District 1.64, while in South-West Battersea the rate was only .47
per 1,000. This is in accordance with the rule that generally speaking
the highest incidence and mortality from zymotic disease will be
found in the less sanitary areas of the Borough, accounted for by the
crowding and absence of facilities for home isolation in the two firstnamed
districts as compared with the latter, in which the 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 26.
The number of deaths registered from the chief zymotic diseases
during 1910 was 180 fewer than the average for the ten years 1900-9.