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2
Telephone:
Feltham 2281 and 2381
Public Health Department,
Council Offices,
Feltham.
July, 1963.
To: The Chairman and Members of the Feltham Urban
District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have pleasure in presenting for your consideration the
Annual Report on the Health and Sanitation of your district
for the year 1962.
During the year there were nineteen infant deaths under
one year of age of which sixteen occurred under four weeks
of age. The greatest single cause, according to the death
certificates, was prematurity where eight children died under
one week old, four in the first day. Other causes were pneumonia,
congenital malformations and pulmonary haemorrhage.
The later cases in the first year were still attributable
to congenital malformations but three children died of pneumonia
and one of birth trauma. One baby died in the first
day due to a rhesus incompatibility factor; this is now quite
a rare cause. The infant mortality rate for this district is
slightly less than that for England and Wales.
In April the attention of the Council was drawn by the
then Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Cormack, to the relationship
between smoking and health. He told the Council that
the report published by the Royal College of Physicians
entitled "Smoking and Health" stressed that cigarette smoking
is a cause of lung cancer and bronchitis and probably
contributes to the development of coronary heart disease
and various other less common diseases. It also delays healing
of gastric and duodenal ulcers. The chance of dying in
the next ten years for a man aged thirty-five, who is a
heavy cigarette smoker, is one in twenty-three, whereas the
risk for a non-smoker is only one in ninety.
A careful examination has been made of the causes of
death under the classification 'malignant diseases of the lungs'
when it was found that twenty-eight males and one female
died in 1962 of this cause. Five years ago there were twentyfive
deaths from this cause, ten years ago there were ten
only and even last year five fewer deaths from this cause
were reported than for the period now under review.