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1
Public Health Department,
Town Hall, N.l.
To The Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the Metropolitan Borough of Islington.
I have the honour to present my Sixteenth Annual Report (which is also the
one hundred and first Annual Report of the district) on the health of the
Metropolitan Borough of Islington, for the year ended 31st December, 1956. The
First Annual Report was presented to the Vestry of the Parish of St. Mary,
Islington, by Dr. Edward Ballard for the year 1856. The opportunity was therefore
taken during the year to mark this centenary by the holding of an Exhibition, which
is referred to in the following pages in this Report. It was also considered
appropriate to compile a brief history dealing with health and sanitary conditions in
the Borough a century ago and mentioning some of the changes which had taken
place since, and this account is included in the Appendix to this Report as " The
Public Health Story of Islington." Whilst it is very obvious that we have moved
very far within the last one hundred years from the gross and sometimes disgusting
insanitary conditions of 1856, the public health story is far from being completed
and there is plenty of scope for further advances as will be evident from this Annual
Report.
Among the most satisfactory health features of the past year are those relating
to infants and young children. The infant mortality rate, although not quite as low
as the exceptional figure for 1954, is nevertheless a very low one ; the risk of an
infant dying before reaching the age of twelve months in the year 1956 was
approximately one half that of ten years ago, and no more than a third of the risk
twenty years ago.
Deaths from tuberculosis of the lungs have again fallen to a record low level,
but the position would be far more satisfactory in regard to this infection if the
new cases were also reduced in the same proportion, which, unfortunately, is not
yet occurring.
I referred in last year's Report to the causal connection which is now accepted
between heavy and prolonged cigarette smoking and the subsequent development in
later life of lung cancer. The evidence of more recent inquiries, not only in this
country but also abroad, has all gone to substantiate this relationship. It is to be
recorded that the number of lung cancer deaths in 1956 was higher than in any
previous year. It was also mentioned in last year's Report that there were other
health risks which were in all probability increased by cigarette smoking, such as
bronchitis of the more chronic type. In the light of this accumulating evidence of
the ill effects of smoking, it is as well that greater publicity is likely to be given in
the future to this difficult problem of habit formation and accepted social custom
which so intimately affects many millions of people. Unquestioning acceptance of
pollution of the atmosphere, both for those who do not smoke as well as those who
do, in public places (e.g. public transport and places of indoor amusement) should
come to an end in this country, as it has done in many other parts of the world.
It is also hoped that a start may be made in the near future to diminish
atmospheric pollution due to the burning of raw coal with the increased powers
now available through the Clean Air Act of 1956. Reference is also made in the
body of the Report to pollution of the atmosphere caused by smoke emission from
heavy diesel-engined vehicles passing through the Borough, particularly upon the