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7
To the Chairman and Members of the
Orpington Urban District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Any year is bound to have its outstanding events, and the purpose
of letter such as this is to draw attention to some of these occurrences
in the field of Public Health. Education is a word very much on
the lips of people to-day, but if the word Health is put in front of
Education, the latter seems to lose its appeal, for there is no doubt
that far too many people tend to ignore the facts that they must know
only too well. Paramount amongst the failures of Health Education,
is the inability to obtain any lasting effective result to the campaign
discourage smoking. There were forty-three deaths from lung
cancer during the year, and over twenty-five thousand in the country
as a whole, 382 deaths from heart and circulatory diseases, and
another 90 from respiratory diseases, and it is probable that tobacco
Played a material part in a high proportion of these deaths. Although
cigarettes are undoubtedly the chief offender, it is perhaps opportune
to point out that other forms of smoking are only relatively less danSerous,
and also make their contribution to both mortality and
morbidity.
At the end of the year, Smallpox was imported into the country,
but in this case the public attitude was quite the reverse of what it
was in the case of smoking, even though there were no local cases,
Many people whose chance of getting the disease was extremely remote
more or less insisted on being vaccinated, and thereby caused acute
ernbarrassment to some general practitioners who were already overloaded
with patients suffering from winter ailments. As a result of
this episode, one hopes that more attention will be paid in the future
to infant vaccination, which although it could not by itself prevent
a smallpox outbreak, at least gives some protection later in life and
saves the patient from the hazards of primary adult vaccination.
While on the subject of protection against disease, it is well to mention
once again the importance of keeping a high level of immunity among
our child population if we are to continue to keep diphtheria at bay.
Similar sentiments can be expressed about anterior poliomyelitis,
except that in this case all under the age of 40 are urged to take
Advantage of the very simple procedure now available for vaccination
against this disease, a procedure which merely involves swallowing
the vaccine.
With the notable exception of measles, infectious diseases were
very much out of the picture, and it is pleasing to be able to report
the complete absence of any outbreak of food poisoning, a result one
hopes, of the intensive efforts of the Department over the years to