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42
The number, of course, is too small to draw any conclusions,
tout it is significant that 9 out of the 13 streets which had an
infantile mortality of 200 per 1,000 births or over are in the
South West Ward. A house-to-house inspection has been made
of most of the above streets, and the others will receive attention
during the coming year.
It has been pointed out in previous reports that some of the
factors in the causation of a high infantile mortality are beyond
the control of a sanitary authority. For instance male infants
iiave always a higher mortality than females. The vital
■superiority of women is evidenced from birth onwards, for male
infants always suffer from a higher death rate than female
infants, and this superiority prevails throughout the rest of life,
except at the ages 5 to 15 when boys and girls are equal in
their freedom from the causes of death. In this district last
year the iufantile mortality amongst female children was :>7 per
1,000 births and among males 107 per 1,000. 767 male children
were born and 82 died, whilst 710 female children were born and
69 died. Some of this difference in vitality between the two
may be explicable, by the greater difficulty with which male
infants are born. One would naturally expect with the increased
proportion of male children an increased mortality from such
•diseases as Prematurity, Injury at birth and Atiophy.
There is an increase in the number of deaths from
Prematurity, but the number of deaths from Congenital Defects
remains the same. Premature births, Congenital Defects and
Atrophy overlap considerably as causes of death, and it is unsafe
to consider them separately, although the death rate from each
of them is stated separately on Table V. Prematurity, Congenital
Defects and Atrophy together were given as the cause of 56
deaths which was also the exact number from these causes in
1909. It has been stated that a considerable number of infants
dying within a few minutes or hours of birth, have in recent
years been registered both as births and deaths, and that in
former years some of the infants similarly dying were buried as
" still-births." In order to ascertain whether the Notification of