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83
SECTION F.
PREVALENCE OF, AND CONTROL OVER, INFECTIOUS
AND OTHER DISEASES.
1. NOTIFIABLE INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
The statistical tables for 1935 do show that there has been a considerable
amount of notifiable infectious disease in Barking.
Infectious diseases occur largely among young people, and because we have a
young population, who form an unusually high percentage of the population in
Barking, there will naturally be on the average more infectious disease than in a
population where the age distributions can be looked upon as ordinary. It must
also be remembered that there are large movements of population in London.
These also tend to vary the amount of infectious disease.
Fortunately we had no cases of smallpox and no cases of cercbro-spinal fever
during the year.
The control of infectious disease is a matter of team work between the general
medical practitioners and your medical officers, who deal with the cases which are
brought to their notice largely by the general medical practitioners.
In this connection, I am happy to be able to state that during the year under
review most cordial relationships have existed between the general practitioners
on the one hand and your own medical officers on the other, and this, I say
unhesitatingly, does materially influence not only the early treatment of individual
cases but the actual control over infectious disease.
As elsewhere, so here also, I would like to thank my colleagues in general
practice for the very valuable assistance they have given me from time to time.
In particular this co-operation is shown by the fact that up to the present we have
always worked together and it has only been necessary for general practitioners to
ring up the Hospital when cases have been admitted without loss of time.
I look forward with confidence to the continuation of these happy relationships
which have tended so much to help the smooth working of the Infectious Diseases
Hospital.