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TO THE CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS
of the
Walthamstow Urban District Council.
Gentlemen,
I beg to submit to you the Annual Report for 1909, dealing
with the Public Health and the circumstances affecting it, so far as
these are under my control.
Dealing as it does with matters well within your own knowledge,
much of it will appear superfluous.
This is the twelfth report I have had the honour of making, but increasing
years make the task no less easy of presenting statistics and
records of deaths and diseases more interesting. However, I trust the
report will be a source of great satisfaction to you, revealing as it does
the good conditions under which our people live, as evidenced in the
death and other rates, and the district's immunity from diseases inimical
to life, compared with other large towns.
Our death-rate is the lowest recorded, and lower than that of any
district around London, except Hornsey. Our crude death-rate was 8.8
and the corrected 9'8, compared with 14.5 for England and Wales, and
15.6 for the "76 Great Towns."
The Zymotic death-rate, or that resulting from deaths caused byMeasles,
Scarlatina, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Typhoid, and Diarrhoea,
was less than 1 per 1,000 of our people ; equally good as in 1908,
and considerably less than half that prevailing for the years preceding.
All these diseases are more or less preventable by appropriate
measures undertaken on behalf of the public health, but, however
good the administration, a permissible or unavoidable mortality will
ensue.