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one hundred and one patients being certified as suffering
from acute primary pneumonia and twenty from acute influenzal
pneumonia. Of these one hundred and twenty-one cases,
seventy-eight were treated in hospital.
During the year, the number of deaths from pneumonia
(all forms) was ninety-nine and nineteen deaths were certified
as due to influenza.
Dysentery.
There were thirty-three cases of dysentery notified during
the year. All were bacillary in origin and the majority of
cases were due to sonne bacillus.
Many of the notifications followed "bacteriological
examination of faeces in very slight cases of diarrhoea in
children at day nurseries. Other cases who gave no history
of intestinal upset were discovered as a result of the routine
examination of faeces from contacts.
All cases were of a mild type, but in one case the
patient (an old lady of 82 years) died in a Kensington nursing
home and dysentery (Plexner) was shown as a contributory
cause of death.
Erysipelas.
Of the fifteen cases notified, nine were admitted to
hospital. There were no deaths.
Cerebro-spinal meningitis.
Eight cases of this disease were notified during the
year. One, a female child aged 5 months, died in hospital,
but the remainder recovered after hospital treatment.
Malaria.
No case of malaria was notified during the year.
Poliomyelitis.
During 1949, fifty-nine cases of poliomyelitis were
notified in Kensington, in forty-seven of which the diagnosis
was confirmed, (twenty-three males and twenty-four females).
There were five deaths. In addition, eleven unnotified
cases were admitted for observation in hospital, where the
diagnosis was not confirmed.
Porty-aix of the forty-seven confirmed cases were treated
in hospital, the exception being a woman of 19 years who died
at home in the early stages of the disease.
The following table shows the age distribution of
patients with and without paralysis