[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Leyton].

  • Leyton (London, England). Urban District Council.
Date:
[1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Leyton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    6/62 (page 6)
    6 INFANT WELFARE AND ANTE-NATAL WORK. This, the third anniversary of the inauguration of Baby Week, affords a good opportunity to review the history and present position of the campaign in Leyton directed to the preservation of infant life. Most of the facts herein set out are well known to many of you, but as each year happily brings us into contact with fresh people interested in the work, I have thought it desirable to repeat them. The great necessity for diminishing the number of deaths among infants and young children is due of course to the serious diminution in the number of infants born. To make this quite clear the following are a few figures affecting the area presided over by the Leyton Urban District Council:— In 1913 the births numbered 2,904 „ 1914 „ „ 2,800 ,, 1915 ,, ,, 2,655 ,, 1916 ,, ,, 2,560 ,, 1917 ,, ,, 1,920 ,, 1918 ,, ,, 1,791 So that it will be seen that in five years the number of births diminished from 2,904 to 1,791, a difference of 1,113. For many years it had been recorded in the reports of Medical Officers of Health and others whose duty it is to com pile health statistics, that the death-rate among infants under one year of age was greatly out of proportion to deaths at other ages. The great improvements in sanitation generally have shown their effects on infant mortality, but in spite of these the infantile mortality rate, which expression is used to indicate the number of deaths of infants under one year of age per 1,000 births, is capable of further considerable reduction. Thus in Leyton our infantile mortality rate averages about 80. I should like to see it reduced to 50. In some towns in England and Wales this rate is 150 and over.