View report page

4
the health of her unborn child. More familiar to the public as
examples of the self-inflicted wounds associated with this personal
form of atmospheric pollution are coronary heart disease, cancer
of the lung, and chronic bronchitis. These are leading causes of
death amongst adults today, both in the country as a whole and
in Wandsworth. Hence the truism that never before has the health
of the individual rested so largely in his or her own hands. In this
context the significance of the slight fall in lung cancer deaths in
the Borough in 1970—259 compared with 267 last year—remains
to be seen, but there can be no doubt of the need for a greater
sense of personal responsibility where potentially lethal habits are
concerned. The consequence for the family which suffers premature
bereavement is frequently harsh as well as painful. More
that the health of the cigarette smoker is at stake, important as
that is.
Infectious disease is another eminently preventable cause of untimely
mortality. Still "captain of the men of death" in the
underdeveloped parts of the globe, it has shrunk almost to insignificance
in this country in modern times, thanks to a century and
more of sanitary effort supported by advances in the fields of
epidemiology, bacteriology, immunology, nutrition and chemotherapy.
Only 70 out of the 4,046 deaths of Wandsworth residents
which occurred in 1970 were attributable to communicable disease
—less than two in every hundred—and the short but sharp influenza
epidemic at the beginning of the year was responsible for no
fewer than 45 of these. Although the incidence of notifiable
infectious disease in the Borough generally was lower than that
recorded the previous year (1,891 notifications being received compared
with 2,190), all was not quiet on this front locally. In addition
to the influenzal episode already mentioned, outbreaks of two
usually but not invariably mild diseases—sonne dysentery and
infective jaundice—occurred; the number of whooping cough notifications
rose markedly, reflecting the increased prevalence of this
disease every third or fourth year; and a potentially hazardous
situation relating to the carriage of virulent diphtheria organisms
was encountered. The appreciable increase in dysentery notifications—from
120 in 1969 to 163 in 1970—was attributable to four
small outbreaks (two at schools, one at a day nursery and one in a
residential nursery), illustrating how readily this fortunately mild
infection spreads in such closely knit communities. A prolonged
episode of infective jaundice at one junior school was responsible
for the virtual doubling of the number of cases of this disease
notified compared with the previous year—104 as opposed to 54;
the abrupt subsidence of this epidemic following the prophylactic
inoculation with gamma globulin of all the pupils considered to be
at risk was most impressive. The increased number of notifications
of whooping cough, dysentery and infective jaundice was more
than offset by the fall from 1,562 to 1,090 in the number of cases
of measles notified. It is too early to say whether this marked