MORTALITY TABLES

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 137, 8 December 1919, Page 8

MORTALITY TABLES

DEATHS FROM INFECTIOUS

DISEASES.

Section 11. of the Public Health Amendment Act, 1919,. reads as follows : "(1) When any person has died of an infectious disease, the undertaker, or other person having charge of the funeral of the deceased, shall forthwith, after having been informed of the cause of death, and.before the removal of the body from the building or other place in which it may then be, give to.the District Health Officer notice in the prescribed form and manner of the fact of the death, and the cause thereof. (2) Every person who commits an offence against this section shall be liable to a fine of twenty pounds."

With a view to putting this section immediately into operation the Health Department is having forms printed on which undertakers etc., will be required to notify all deaths from infectious diseases. In. this way it is hoped that in future more comprehensive infectiousdisease statistics will be available, and some definite relationship will be capable of being established between the incidence and the mortality rates of the various infectious diseases, firstly as local epidemics, and secondly throughout the Dominion. As soon as the data is available, the Department proposes to insert an additional table in the Public Health Journal which will show monthly the number of notifications received of'infectious diseases in quinquennial age-groups, and the number of deaths from each disease similarly classified.