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27
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, simple and 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 for the year 1912 from this standpoint
exhibit very satisfactory results. There has been a great decrease
in the death-rate from these diseases during the year under report,
constituting a record for the Borough.
In the Borough of Battersea during 1912 there were registered
from the principal zymotic diseases 133 deaths, as against 331
deaths in 1911, and 209 in 1910, giving a corrected zymotic deathrate
of 0.79 per 1,000, the corrected death-rate for the County of
London being 1.1, varying in the different Metropolitan Boroughs
from 0.2 in Stoke Newington and 04 in Hampstead to 2.6 in
Shoreditch and Finsbury. The zymotic death-rate varies considerably
for the three sub-districts into which for registration purposes
the Borough is divided. Thus in East Battersea the rate
was 1.0, in North-West Battersea 0 95, while in South-West
Battersea the rate was only 0.32 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 first named 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 28.