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37
December, 10. The effect of the harsher weather is, as might be
expected, not markedly reflected in this distribution. By contrast,
the corresponding figures relating to the deaths of children aged one week
to one month were 25, 4 and 4; and of infants from 3 to 12 months,
40, 21 and 15.
"These figures therefore suggest that in spite of the fact that the
infant mortality rate has risen sharply from 1939 to 1940 and less
sharply from 1940 to 1941, that it need not be accepted that this is an
inevitable consequence of the war, or that there must of necessity be a
steady deterioration."
In point of fact in the following years the rate fell below that ever
previously recorded for the district since amalgamation. The rise to
38-0 in 1943 brought the figure only to the very satisfactory pre-war
rate.
Tuberculosis: Another of the diseases responsible for additional
fatalities in times of physical stress and unsatisfactory environmental
conditions is tuberculosis. Owing to the usually long course of illness
deaths occur perhaps many years after the declared onset and because
this too may be insidious and protracted, very long after the patient
has been exposed to those influences which resulted in his succumbing.
Where deaths, then, follow a disease in which the onset is ascribable to
such disturbances as have been experienced during the war they will
take place later than would, say, those infant deaths ascribed to the same
causes.

It will be noted that in any one year the numbers of deaths from
non-pulmonary disease in males and from pulmonary and non-pulmonary
disease in females barely exceeded those for the year 1938. The rise
occurred almost entirely amongst the males with figures of 72 and 61
in the peak years 1941 and 1942 as against that of 30 in 1938. (This
figure of 30 while low was not a freak figure as the corresponding one
in 1937 was 35 and in 1935, 36.)