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BOROUGH OF BRENTFORD AND CHISWICK
Public Health Department,
Town Hall, Chiswick, W. 4.
To the Mayor. Aldermen and Councillors
of the Borough of Brentford and Chiswick.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present the 36th Annual Report on the health of the
people of Brentford and Chiswick.
The year 1963 was a very strange one in that although for almost the first
quarter of the year the weather was bitter and hard in a manner which might have
been expected to produce illness in a population not accustomed to such severity,
living in homes both inadequately heated and insufficiently protected against
hard frosts and working very often in ill ventilated and overheated modern office
buildings or factories, yet the health pattern in the Borough was good. The
Birth Rate rose slightly, the Death Rate fell, the Infant Mortality Rate was
not a great deal more than half the average rate for the rest of the country and
notifiable infectious disease, apart from an outbreak of mild measles was inconsiderable.
Diseases of the heart and circulation gave the highest figures in the causes
of deaths list and cancer came second to coronary disease and showed a distinct
fall in 1963 from the 1962 figure.
Alarms occurred during the year about suspected cases of typhoid and small™
pox coming in from abroad, but no trouble followed any of these incidents. There
was rather more evidence of virus diseases occurring, however, a considerable
amount of mild influenza in January and February, a number of students infected
by a viral form of sickness at one school, and from time to time, cases of infectious
hepatitis and glandular fever. None of these viral diseases are compulsorily
notifiable and such occurrences are only made known to the Medical
Officer of Health by communications from enthusiastic and preventive health
minded general practitioners.
The inspection of food handling methods and of the premises in which food
is handled is a very important part of the work of the Department and although
there has been a continuing improvement in the Borough in the conditions of food
premises, it is unsatisfactory to find so many contraventions of the Pood Hygiene
Regulations in the statistics to be found on page 30/31. Dirty premises and insufficient
rat proofing are faults which might result in illness amongst the
consumers and cannot be tolerated. It seems that the public is very gradually
becoming more sensitive to these matters and complaints reaching the department
are dealt with promptly and if necessary by using the full force of the law as
can be seen from the number of successful prosecutions undertaken and reported
on page 32
The welfare of the elderly continued to occupy the attention of the departmental
staff, and there was also an increase in the amount of voluntary work
for the elderly undertaken by private citizens during the year. The meals service
continued to expand and although another van, bringing the total to three,
was brought into service during the year, already at the endof the year it was
obvious that a fourth van was becoming urgently necessary.
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