Some worrying reading

REGARDING your report on Red Spot Babies. I wonder if Professor Sir James Spence or his team interested in Newcastle’s high infant mortality, read Dr William Brend’s Health and the State (Constable, 1917), the preface of which starts:

“A healthy population is the finest form of national wealth, and in an industrialised country its possession depends to a large extent upon the completeness of the Public Health services and the success they achieve in securing a sound environment.”

Dr Brend’s scrutiny of the 1914 infant mortality rates for all parts of the British Isles showed that poverty couldn’t be blamed and that air pollution must be the dominant causal factor.

Newcastle’s rate in 1914 was joint 14th highest with Dudley and South Shields at 137 per 1,000, with Sunderland next highest at 136 per 1,000 live births. The 1944 edition of Black’s Medical Dictionary states: “As a general rule it is lowest in agricultural districts, higher in thickly populated mining and manufacturing regions, and highest in large towns where textile industries are carried on and where female labour is largely employed.”

The above shows that the medical profession must have known that poverty couldn’t be blamed – no matter how convenient, and that infant death rates rise with increased exposure to air pollution from industrial sources.

The year before the infamous Byker incinerator started in 1979, Newcastle’s infant mortality rate was 10 per 1,000 live births and the England & Wales rate was 13 per 1,000.

In 1991, Newcastle’s rate was 10.7 per 1,000, whilst the England & Wales rate had fallen to 7.4 per 1,000 live births. MICHAEL RYAN, Shrewsbury