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4
Public Health Department,
Town Hall,
Bethnal Green, E. 2.
16th May, 1928.
To the Mayor, the Aldermen and Councillors
of the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In presenting to you my first Annual Keport it may be
apposite, perhaps, for me to draw your attention to some special
matters dealt with therein.
It is customary to discuss, as some criterion of the health of
a district, the birth rate and the death rate. Both exhibit one common
feature, a fall—the birth rate to the second lowest recorded
and the death rate to the same figure as the lowest hitherto reached.
In view of the abnormal housing shortage and unemployment,
it is possible to regard the former with some complacency. The
latter gives cause for considerable satisfaction. It may be too
much to expect the death rate to continue to fall. If, however,
both rates should still decline, it will not be long before we reach
a population only slowly progressive or more or less stationary.
The lowering of the general death rate is mainly occasioned
by the marked reduction in the number of deaths of infants. In
1927, the number of deaths during the first month of life dropped
by 26 per cent., as compared with the average for the five previous
years, while the deaths of infants under one year was easily the
lowest on record, viz., 57.7 per 1,000 births compared with 112.0
ten years before. Put in a concrete form, this latter comparison
means that last year 127 children's lives were saved which would
have been lost had the infant death rate been the same as in 1917.
It is necessary to exercise caution when drawing deductions
from, and allocating causes to, mortality statistics which are liable
to fluctuations, but it is impossible to dissociate the forward and
progressive Maternity and Child Welfare policy of the Council from
this most satisfactory record. Attendance at the Welfare Centres
inspires parental watchfulness for the beginnings of disease; school
medical inspection by periodical examination provides for a similar
surveillance over the growing child; is it not a reasonable deduction
that periodical medical overhaul of the adolescent and the
adult would decrease morbidity and increase longevity ?
The section dealing with the work of Sanitary Inspection,
necessarily condensed, emphasises not only the volume of work
undertaken, but the varied nature of the duties falling upon the