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PREFACE
To the Chairman and Members of the
Carshalton Urban District Council.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present my Annual Report on the health of the
district for the year 1959.
The statistics in respect of the year provide brief but sure evidence of
the generally improving trends which have been manifest for so many years.
Comparison from year to year may show but little variation and one has to
look back over intervals of decades to appreciate the strides that have been
made in public health.
The birth rate in 1959 was slightly up on the year before. The death
rate was again significantly less than that for the country as a whole and has
varied little over the last twenty years, in spite of the fact that during that
period there has been an appreciable rise in the average age of the population
as a result of the maturing of the St. Helier Estate, which when first
established in the 1930s, originally housed a young population. There has
however been, as elsewhere, a progressive increase in the extent to which
some individual causes of death contribute to the total mortality with
corresponding decreases in other directions. Disease of the heart, which
includes a high proportion of the degenerative conditions associated with
advancing years, accounts for more deaths than any other, approximately
one third of the total, and of this group coronary disease takes an increasing
share. Cancer shews no signs yet of relinquishing its position as one
of the prime killing diseases with malignant disease of the lungs claiming a
steadily increasing proportion of all cancer deaths. On the credit side is the
marked saving of life from tuberculosis and infectious disease and the
improvement in maternal and infant mortality.
Apart from measles which staged its usual biennial epidemic wave in
1959, the incidence of infectious disease generally continued at a satisfactory
low level. There is no doubt that the progressive reduction in most of the
contagious illnesses is largley due to the marked success achieved in perfecting
effective immunising procedures. It is no mere coincidence that the
ravages of smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and poliomyelitis,
have been either eliminated or greatly reduced, whilst measles
against which no protective procedure for mass application has yet been
found, continues its regular visitation with undiminished force, although the
mortality of this highly prevalent infection has been reduced by the better
standard of medical and nursing care. There was again no death from any
of the notifiable diseases other than tuberculosis which caused only three
deaths in 1959, a record low figure.
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