Poliomyelitis : a survey of the outbreak in Scotland in 1947.

Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Poliomyelitis : a survey of the outbreak in Scotland in 1947. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (c) Number of apartments, type of illness and age groups. The sum- mary table is reproduced as Table 12a. The first comment is on variations within distributions. None of the types of illness has a homogeneous distribution ; the three distributions show that, for each type of illness, the younger patients lived, on the whole, in worse housing environment as judged by rooms per house. The lack of uniformity in room distribution was very highly significant in patients with both forms of poliomyelitis, and significant in the “ not poliomyelitis ” type of illness. Justification is necessary of the step of combining all ages under 5, when a pronounced age trend has been found. The distributions by years and house apartments at ages under 5 have been examined and found not to differ significantly from uniformity, so that little or no information has been lost by the compression of data. Comparisons between distributions were simplified by the result of a com- parison, by age groups, between the apartment distributions of paralytic and non-paralytic cases of poliomyelitis: the differences between the distributions were insignificant, so that poliomyelitis—as a whole—could be contrasted with “not poliomyelitis.” This contrast revealed that the housing environment (qua rooms) of cases of poliomyelitis was superior in all age groups to that of cases of “ not poliomyelitis” but the significance of the differences varied from one age group to another, as below :— Ages under 5: not significant ; Ages 5-9 =: very highly significant; Ages 10-14 : significant ; Ages 15-19: highly significant ; Ages 20-29 : very highly significant ; Ages 30- : highly significant ; All Ages : very highly significant. Thus, in children under 5, all patients—whether they were eventually found to have had poliomyelitis or not—tended to develop their illnesses in smaller homes ; older patients who did not have poliomyelitis tended to come from larger homes, but this tendency was less pronounced than that of patients who had poliomyelitis at ages over 5, this last group being the best housed, as judged by number of apartments, of all the groups. It will be evident, by inspection of the absolute figures of Table 12, that in assessing their significance some compression had to be made because of small numbers ; in general, houses of less than three apartments had to be grouped together for patient ages above 10, so as to yield assessable figures. (d) Number of apartments and fatality rates. The only type of illness in which there was any suggestion of an association between number of apartments and fatality rate was poliomyelitis with paralysis. ‘The progression was as follows : Apartments Fatality Rate 1 492%, 2 858%, 3 11-54% 4 lS Succi eter pen pte 5 or more oe nis 14*58% Institutions... se 20% (3 out of 15) The actual figures did not differ significantly from those of a null hypothesis (room number not associated with fatality rate), and remain no more than suggestive.