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To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Metropolitan
Borough of Lambeth.
Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present to you the 93rd Annual Report
on the health of the Borough of Lambeth. This sequence of
reports does, in fact, refer throughout almost exactly to the same
district because, unlike most Metropolitan Boroughs, the former
Parish and the Borough of Lambeth were one and the same. As
ray predecessor reported to you just under fifty years ago "the
area changes are not serious, so that the old Parish of Lambeth
and the new Borough of Lambeth practically correspond."
The area is the same, but the conditions of life of the people
have changed out of all recognition during those 50 years. Then
the general death rate was 17.4 per 1,000 inhabitants; now it is
12.04. The birth rate was 28.2, now 17.91 per 1,000 population,
and most remarkable the infantile mortality was 145 and now
only 29 per 1,000 births.
The population estimated to the middle of the year by the
Registrar General is again a little higher at 229,400, an addition
of 2,800. Since the new houses erected in the district during the
year for which habitation certificates were requested numbered
686, at an average of five persons in each family occupying them,
it will be readily appreciated that the overcrowding conditions
remain more or less as they were a year ago. Fortunately again
there has been no serious epidemic of infectious disease and, but
for the disturbing fact that the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis
again increased slightly but definitely in each of the four quarters
of the year, there would be little cause for anxiety.
The greater risk from tuberculosis arises from two out of the
three principal causes which have been known for many years.
First, overcrowding increases the likelihood of exposure to infection
; second the lack of hospital beds prevents the segregation
of the chronic cases which spread infection, but fortunately the
third cause, inadequate nourishment, has been eliminated by the
system of rationing in force. The first two causes show little sign
of betterment. The waiting period for a sanatorium bed is often
nine months or more and there is thus little opportunity of training
sufferers to follow a course of life which will make their presence
after discharge from hospital less of a danger to the community
round them. In one lodging house alone, there are now twenty-one
cases of tuberculosis whose chance of a hospital bed is almost nil
and who, by their presence, are a constant menace to the 400
other lodgers with whom there is the usual contact.