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STREATHAM,
INCLUDING
TOOTING AND BALHAM.
IN accordance with instructions from your Board, necessitating
the production of an Annual Report and summary of the year's
sanitary operations in this sub-district, the following remarks and
tables are with deference submitted, as indicating the progress
which sanitation is making in this locality.
STATISTICS OF MORTALITY.
The deaths registered during the year 1861 numbered 128—
69 males and 59 females—which is exactly the average of the four
preceding years, but less than for the year 1860 by 24, and for
1859 by 41. The returns show a very decided improvement for
the past year in comparison with the three previous years.
The number of persons dying between the ages of 60 and 80 and
upwards has undergone a diminution from 54 in the year 1860
to 40 in the year under review. The number who reached 80
years and upwards has also decreased from 15 to 8. Nearly the
same number of young persons under 20 succumbed during the
past year as during 1860. Of these, the children who died under
5 years greatly predominated, the number registered being 46,
whilst in 1860, only 39 were recorded.
This death-rate of infants between birth and 5 years of age,
compared with that of the entire district, is relatively low, doubtless
in consequence of there being fewer poor in the parishes comprising
this sub-district, and therefore fewer of those causes in operation
that tend to foster disease in the very young, than are to be found
in more crowded localities. Seeing, however, it is to what are
usually termed preventible diseases that a large number of infants
fall victims, the high death-rate above referred to ought to stimulate
us to increasing endeavours to remove every possible cause
having a tendency to augment the result we have so frequently to
deplore.
The mean annual death-rate of this sub-district for the past ten
years is a fraction over 15 per 1,000 living, a number according to
the Registrar General's statistics, comparable with that of the
healthiest places in all England.