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4
Town Hall,
Euston Road, N.W.1.
July, 1950.
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the
Metropolitan Borough of Saint Pancras.
Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have pleasure in presenting to you my annual report for the year 1949, the sixth it
has been my privilege to place before you.
Since the passing of the National Health Service Act, 1946, attention has been focused
on disease rather than health; on the cure of sickness rather than on its prevention, despite
the fact that it is better to keep a person well and out of hospital than to give him expert
treatment once he enters.
These pages therefore refer to preventive medicine, to problems of infectious disease,
including poliomyelitis and tuberculosis, to the prevention of smallpox, the care of those who
work in their homes, and to details of work concerned with factories, workshops, the preparation
of food, and general sanitary problems. I have made a few comments on the serious housing
situation in the borough, and to the need for a service to care for the aged—matters which
are receiving our urgent attention, but the work that lies before a public health department
in a central London borough in improving the health and the happiness of its citizens is limitless
in its scope.
The population of the borough in the middle of 1949 was 141,330—an increase of 1,130
in one year. The lowest population recorded in recent years in St. Pancras was in 1941 when
it was 103,770. Since then there has been an increase of nearly 40,000 individuals living in
the borough. Most of this increase, however, has occurred since the end of the war in 1945,
and this means that the Council has had to plan the post-war reconstruction of its social services
against a steadily increasing population.
The number of births in the borough, at 2,290, is 157 less than last year; the birth rate
has fallen by 1.2 to a figure of 16.2.
Poliomyelitis.
The year was marked by an outbreak of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis). During the
course of 1949 there were 66 notifications, in 45 of which the diagnosis was confirmed after
admission to hospital, laboratory tests and consultants' opinion.
London has suffered from two outbreaks of poliomyelitis in recent years, one in 1947 and
the other in 1949. The number of cases that were notified in St. Pancras in 1947, was 36.
In 1949 it was 66. This disease is associated with an incubation period of about 10 to 20 days,
an acute febrile illness resulting in paralysis in 50 per cent, of the cases. In probably 50 per
cent, the paralysis is to some extent permanent. The fact that we have had two epidemics
within so short a period has given rise to the fear that in England the disease may be assuming
a recurrence similar to that which appertains in the United States of America. During the
course of the year my attention was drawn to the fact that two children aged 10 months had
developed paralysis within two or three weeks of receiving a combined injection against
whooping cough and diphtheria. This caused me to investigate all the cases recently notified