27. Details of the principal causes of mortality are given in the following table. Most of the deaths from the diarrhoeas and the pneumonias occurred in infants.
TABLE 4
Number of Deathe
Canses of Death
1953
1954
Malignant neoplasmoo
952
1.000
Gastro-enteritis and colitia
2,649
2,690
Paeonomia (all forms)
3,696
3,837
Premature births
#76
Tuberculosis of respiratory system
1,974
921 2,052
Tuberculosis futher farms)
965
824
IV.
HEALTH DIVISION
Hygiene and Sanitation.
for scavenging services in the major centres of population to the District Commissioner, New Territories. The year has been notable for a rapid development of industry and urbanization in certain areas. This development has produced many public health problems which have proved extremely difficult to control. The three main centres of population in the New Territories now comprise large size market and industrial towns with populations of fifty thousand or more, and the staff originally provided to supervise the hygiene and sanitation of these places when they were small rural townships is now experiencing great difficulty in maintaining adequate control.
Communicable Diseases.
30. Hong Kong again remained completely free of any case of the six quarantinable diseases, smallpox, cholera, plague, typhus, yellow fever and relapsing fever. In this connexion the following table is of interest:
Diseas
of
Sallpox
TABLE S
Date of last case reported in Huay Kong
Reinurks
June, 1952
June, 1947
Imported cove.
1924
28. As stated in paragraph 8, the Urban Services Depart-
with the maintenance ment is principally concerned environmental hygiene. There has been little change in the general picture of gross overcrowding further complicated by the acute shortage of water in the urban areas where some 2,000,000 people are crowded into an area of some 10 to 12 square miles. Considerable progress has been made in clearing squatter areas, though assisted somewhat too vigorously by fire, and that problem is slowly coming under control. To ease the acute housing shortage, Government has authorized the formation of A Housing Authority with wide powers to build low rental houses and that body has initiated several major housing projects, the first of which is now in process of development. The Medical Department is represented on this body by the Assistant Director of Health Services.
29. The environmental hygiene and sanitation of the New Territories is still the responsibility of the Medical Department, although plans are in hand to transfer much of the responsibility
3
Plague
Yellow Fever
Typhus........
Relapsing Fever..
Jo
ل
June, 1930
Nu case bea ever been
reported.
Scrub type negru, za
epidemic type reported,
31. There was a slight decrease in the total number of cases of communicable disease notified as compared with the notifications made in 1953 and there has also been a definite drop in the number of deaths from these diseases and in the case fatality rates, which indicates more efficient treatment. On the
9