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TO HIS WORSHIP THE MAYOR, THE ALDERMEN AND THE COUNCILLORS OF THE
BOROUGH OF PADDINGTON.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies, and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present to you my annual report dealing with the health of the
Borough, and the work of vour Public Health Department during the past year-—as bv law
required. I have continued the series of vital statistics with which you have been made
familiar through earlier reports, but I have not that confidence in those statistics which I
could desire to possess. Rather more than eight years having elapsed since the last census,
the estimates of the number of inhabitants of the Borough have in consequence lost much
of the reliability requisite for critical study. It may be necessary to recalculate many of the
statistics given in this report when the results of the next census are known.
The birth-rate in 1908 showed a trifling increase in comparison with that of 1907, due
in all probability to the disturbance in the normal course of the registration of births consequent
upon the introduction of notification. Last year this rate showed a decrease amounting
to 1.47 per 1,000. In no previous vear has there been so large a fall.
Of the infectious diseases which are notified, scarlet fever alone was undulv prevalent
during the past year. The fatality of that disease was, however, below the average, and
the increase in the mortality rate from it, but trifling.
There was a very slight increase last year in the death-rate from all causes in comparison
with the preceding vear, but the corrected rate for the year, 12.96 per 1,000, was well below
the decennial mean rate (14.01). The contrasts between the rates for 1899 and 1909—16"63
and 12.96—is very satisfactory. The greater part of that difference is due to the reduction
in the infantile mortality rate, which was 153 per 1,000 births in the former year, and 107 last
year—the lowest on record. If the rate of 1899 had prevailed last year, the total death-rate
in 1909 would have been 15.88 instead of 12.96, so that of the total reduction in last year's
rate (3.65 per 1,000), a reduction equal to 2.92 per 1,000, was due to lower infantile mortality,
leaving a balance equal to 0.75 per 1,000 due to reduced mortality at other ages.
The decline in the mortality at ages under one year (infantile mortality) has been
continuous since 1904, when the rate was 136 per 1,000 births. It would be gratifying if one
could unreservedly place the credit for that reduction to the efforts of the Council and the
Department to check the waste of infant life. Part of the reduction may, I think, be
unhesitatingly attributed to those efforts, but I feel that the test of the work has yet to be
applied. I await with considerable interest the occurrence of a summer with weather
favourable to a severe epidemic of infantile diarrhoea. That disease (or those diseases,
for I am uncertain whether " infantile diarrhoea " is really one disease, or many) has been
very low in prevalance for some five years. Last year the mortality at all ages from
diarrhoeal diseases was 0.25 per 1,000, which figure may be compared with the rate of 1.52
per 1,000 recorded in 1899. If, after a hot dry summer, an infantile mortality rate anywhere
below 110 per 1,000 births be recorded, then I think it will be possible to proclaim the success
of the preventive—or rather, educative—measures in use. Attention may here be directed