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credit must go to those who provide the basic essential environmental
services, the adequate supply of pure wholesome water, the efficient
drainage of the district, the cleansing service including removal of house
refuse and street sweeping. Given all these favourable factors though,
trouble might still arise through lapses in hygienic standards through
thoughtlessness, lack of consideration or ignorance. It is here that the
work of the Public Health Inspectors carried out under the Chief Public
Health Inspector, Mr. S. N. King, is of such importance. The emphasis
on their work is changing. Inspectors passed from the designation of
Inspectors of Nuisances who were concerned so much with drainage
defects, housing faults and control of nuisances to the Sanitary Inspector
whose time was still so much taken up with similar problems. Then on
to today's Public Health Inspectors who are spending even less of their
time on such physical conditions and steadily more on health education
in different ways. Remedying the defects in the conditions under which
people live still looms too much in their work, but even with the slum
clearance programme the volume of this work is lessening. Although
there were no spectacular advances in this last year on this campaign,
steady progress was made and by the end of the year a further
number of houses had been dealt with. As in so many of these the
demolition was not carried out until 1959, the figures do not give a true
indication of the extent to which the housing conditions of the occupants
of those properties have improved. If not the result of, at least subsequent
to, the Rent Act, there was a marked move by owners to carry out work
on many houses which it had been considered at one time would have to
be dealt with under the Council's slum clearance programme. Sufficient
work has been done in a number of these houses to remove them from
having to be considered in the five-year programme. The standard of
accommodation at these often enough is not very high, but the work done
to improve them certainly warrants their being retained as housing units
for a further term of years. The improvement in the staffing position came
too late to enable much leeway to be overtaken, with the result that it was
not possible to make any definite advance in regard to the delineation of a
smoke control area.
The decline in the importance of some of the infections is one of the
most striking changes in recent years. Even as recently as 1934 measles
caused the death of twelve children in this district, whooping cough three,
scarlet fever nine and diphtheria eight. In that year, even in a population
not much more than half today's, there were 163 new cases of tuberculosis,
a disease which caused the deaths of seventy-seven people. As a contrast,
in this last year there were no deaths from scarlet fever, diphtheria and
whooping cough and only one from measles. Only eight people died
from tuberculosis, there being only 118 new cases. Against that, food
poisoning and food infections have become more common, though
fortunately not causing many fatalities, and poliomyelitis has been a
matter of concern for the last twelve years. With tuberculosis apparenty
now well on the way to being controlled, poliomyelitis possibly also, and
there being hope in regard to the control of the spread of influenza,
infections look like becoming of relatively slight public health signincanc.
Housing conditions are improving and there cannot be any relaxation of