Abstract
ACCORDING to Dr. E. Sydney Morris, director general of public health of the State of New South Wales, the chief event in the State since 1875 has been the rapid growth of Sydney, so that though the State is about 95 per cent rural the population has become increasingly urban. In 1939 the population was 2,749,134, of whom 1,380,940 lived in the metropolitan area of Sydney. Since 1875 the mortality from tuberculosis in New South Wales has dropped steadily, whereas the cancer mortality has increased at nearly the same rate. In 1875 the tuberculosis mortality was 154 and the cancer mortality 31 per 100,000 population. In 1895 the rates were respectively 109 and 44, in 1935 they were 105 and 39, and in 1939 tuberculosis fell to 37 and cancer rose to 113. The mortality from heart disease has shown an enormous rise in recent years., In 1875 it was 79; it fell to 57 in 1893, and has since risen, at first slowly and then rapidly, to 259 in 1939. As regards infectious diseases, influenza showed a mortality of about 5 until the great epidemic of 1891, when it rose to 87: it dropped to 8 in 1893 and 5 in 1917. In 1919, it rose to 319.3, and in 1920 it fell again to 18. Since then it has shown abrupt rises and falls. In 1899, when the incidence of scarlet fever was the highest on record (48.5 per 10,000 population), the mortality from this disease (2 per 100,000) was the lowest recorded until then. The mortality from measles has shown a great reduction, in the height of the peaks since 1915 and a smaller incidence in the intervening troughs.
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Disease in New South Wales. Nature 148, 406 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148406b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148406b0