View report page

39
INFECTIOUS DISEASES.
There were notified during the year altogether 587 cases of
infectious disease. This gives a notification rate of 3.8 per 1,000,
the lowest notification rate experienced since the Act came into force.
SMALL POX.
Yet another year, the sixth in succession of freedom from small
pox, has to be recorded. The proportion of surviving infants who
remain unvaccinated has steadily risen from 27 per cent, in the smallpox
years to 48 per cent, in 1910, while the number of conscientious
objectors to vaccination has, during the same period, risen from 3.0 for
every 100 children vaccinated to 34.8. Long continued freedom from
smallpox, associated with increased neglect of vaccination are doubtless
correlative facts, the correct formulation of which it is hopeless to
expect will be accepted until the evidence has again enforced its
recognition in the tragic terms of a smallpox epidemic. No disease
is so certainly preventible as smallpox, none in which the measures of
prevention have received so wide and uniform consent among those
best qualified to speak, and yet to-day one half our population is
growing up wholly unprotected from a disease which, in these circumstances,
should it once establish a footing, will spread with an appalling
ferocity of which we have no modern parallel.
D