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# HOUSING CONDITIONS AND DISEASE.
The urban population of the Colony is crowded into a small area. For the last twenty years it has become more and more difficult to find room for the ever increasing Chinese population. Old houses formerly occupied by Europeans and standing in their own gardens and old small Chinese houses have been demolished and replaced by many storeyed Chinese tenement dwellings.
The result is that overcrowding, always serious in the Colony, has increased.
The following figures will be of interest in this respect.
Health Districts 4 to 8 inclusive form the great central Chinese portion of Victoria. Their combined acreage is 200 practically all built over. The Chinese houses and population therein as enumerated at the censuses of 1911 and 1921 can be compared by the following table.
1911 1921 Houses 4,877 5,003 Floors.... 16,100 16,834 Population 122,752 156,658 Persons per house 25.1 31.3 Persons per acre 613.7 783.29The census figures of 1921 are admittedly too low and, if the figures for persons per house and acre for 1921 be increased by ten per cent. a more accurate estimate will probably be obtained. This would bring the number of persons per house to 34.4 and per acre to 861.6.
Very many ground floors are used as shops and stores occupied at night by the shop's master and his coolies only.
Based on the above given figures the average number of persons per floor in these districts was in 1911 7.6 persons, while for 1921, using the estimated figure for persons per house, it was 10.17 or about 33 per cent. more.
Owing to the fact that shops and stores are not occupied to the same extent as are upper floors it follows that the number of persons per upper floor must exceed the above figures. Observation indeed shows that this is the case and that the upper floors of tenement houses are greatly overcrowded.
Overcrowding has naturally an effect on the spread of infectious diseases.
Some diseases e.g. Influenza and Cerebro-Spinal Fever, are spread by what is known as "Droplet Infection". The infected person, whether sufferer or carrier, discharges when he coughs or sneezes minute droplets liable to contain the specific infective parasite. In crowded rooms, streets, places of amusement, etc., those who, being in close proximity to such a person, breathe air thus often intensely contaminated are liable to direct infection.