[Report 1957-1958] / Medical Officer of Health, Berkshire County Council.

  • Berkshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1957-1958] / Medical Officer of Health, Berkshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/44 (page 10)
    tor certain previous five-year periods. That for Berkshire for 1957-58 was 6-8, compared with 9-2 for England and Wales for the same period. Deaths from non-pulmonary tuberculosis in Berkshire in 1957 and 1958 were 2 and 3 respectively. 1 he death rate from non-pulmonary tuberculosis is now becoming so small that purely chance variations in the figures are relatively large. 1 uberculosis notifications for England and Wales as a whole have been published by the Registrar General since 1954. Since the end of the war the national death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis has been falling with rapidity, due largely to the introduction of the new chemotherapeutic drugs. In the first part of the same period the notification rate has been much more resistant, and has only shown a definite tendency to fall in recent years. Notifications have been inflated to some extent since 1948 by two factors : (i) chiefly by the introduction of Mass Radiography, so that now perhaps a third of all new pulmonary cases are discovered by this method ; and (ii) there has been a greater tendency for cases of primary tuberculosis to be notified. The notification rate is now falling in spite of these factors. This is especially welcome, for there was previously a tendency to say, and with some justification, that the deaths were falling but that the number of new cases was more or less stationary. Since 1954 there have also been published figures for notifications of cases of tuberculosis of the meninges and central nervous system. These are invariably serious cases, virtually all of which must be ascertained, and they are a good index of the intensity of tuberculosis infection in the community, subject to the proviso that in this connection immunisation by B.C.G. vaccine (see page 21) appears likely to have a very appreciable preventive effect. The number of such cases in England and Wales as a whole in the five years 1954/58 were respectively 692, 532, 433, 326 and 274. In Berkshire in the same five years the numbers of notifications under this head were respectively 2, 7, 2, 1 and 0. (Owing to a drafting error, these figures were given incorrectly in the last Report.) TABLE VI. CRUDE DEATH RATE FROM TUBERCULOSIS PER 100,000 POPULATION, BERKSHIRE. PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS. NON-PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS. Quinquennium, 1906-10 87 Quinquennium, 1906-10 24 Quinquennium, 1941-45 36 Quinquennium, 1941-45 11 Quinquennium, 1946-1950 28-7 Quinquennium, 1946-1950 ... 3-9 Quinquennium, 1951-55 13-2 Quinquennium, 1951-55 1-6 Triennium, 1956-58 7-4 Triennium, 1956-58 ... 0-7