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6
To the Chairman and Members of the
Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Report for 1952 follows the directions of the Ministry
of Health under Circular 2/53 and takes the form of previous
years' reports. If statistics seem to be the dominant feature it
is because statistics are useful for comparison with previous years
and also that they give some indication of the progress or
retardation of Public Health so far as it affects Chislehurst and
Sidcup. A death rate of 8.7, a birth rate of 15.1, an infantile
mortality rate of 19.5 when taken in comparison with the rates
of England and Wales indicate that the state of health is good.
As is well known such comparisons are only true if one is comparing
like with like, viz., a population of equal age groups. It
is known that the child population of Chislehurst and Sidcup is
comparably higher than that of its neighbours and because there
has during recent years, been a remarkable reduction in the
killing diseases of childhood, it follows that from these two facts
alone the death rate should be a low one. There were in fact
only 11 deaths in children between the ages of one and fifteen,
whereas in children under one year of age there were 25 deaths.
Infectious Disease as a cause of death in 1952 was negligible.
There were no deaths from Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever, Whooping
Cough or from Measles—a very different picture from that of a
few years back. There were 2 deaths from Meningococcal
Meningitis, 2 from Influenza and 1 from Infantile Paralysis.
There were 17 deaths from Tuberculosis of the Lungs and 21
deaths from Cancer of the Lungs.
As Cancer of the Lung is not a notifiable disease our
knowledge of its incidence is dependent upon death returns
which for the country as a whole show a big increase in the past
20 years. Whether this big increase can be ascribed to improved
diagnosis entirely is possible but unlikely. The fact that we
seem to be relatively free from the scourge in these parts (our
rate being .26 per 1,000 population compared with .59 for England
and Wales) may be due to the fact that we are fortunate to be
living in a district where there is plenty of fresh air, sunlight,
open space and absence of gross atmospheric pollution, but the
actual part played by these factors in the causation of this disease
has not yet been satisfactorily determined, nor to my mind, has
the role of tobacco as the villain of the piece yet been factually
determined.
To pass on to the other subject namely pulmonary
tuberculosis, here we can draw a much more cheerful picture,
for in Chislehurst and Sidcup the death rate from this disease
has been reduced from 0.55 per thousand population in 1948 to
0.26 in 1952.