REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE REGISTRATION 



OF BIRTHS 



Presented by the Chairman, Dr. CRESSY L. WILBUR, Chief Statis- 

 tician, Bureau of the Census 



Study, or knowledge, of infant mortality should precede, as it 

 does in the title of this Association, prevention of infant mor- 

 tality. 



This is reasonable and natural, and will doubtless command 

 the assent of all workers for the saving of human life in infancy 

 or at any period of age. We must first know the nature and 

 exact extent of the evils that we seek to check before we can 

 obtain the most efficient results in our efforts for their preven- 

 tion, or be able to measure the efficiency of the various sanitary 

 agencies employed. 



In the narrow sense this may not be too literally true. We 

 should not claim too much for the indispensable importance of 

 proper statistical methods in dealing with the practical prob- 

 lems of infant and child mortality because common sense will 

 point out at once that much has been done and very much 

 more can be done in the utter absence of reliable vital statis- 

 tics, or of any statistics at all, to prevent many deaths of infants. 

 We can use the experience of other countries, whose sanitary 

 services have been founded upon a sound basis of vital statis- 

 tics such as the United States does not, at present, possess. It 

 is not necessary to consult a table of statistics to know that 

 filthy, bacteria-teeming milk should not be used by human 

 beings, and that the whole chain of milk production, from pro- 

 ducer to the smallest ultimate consumer (with one little sick 

 baby), safe-guarded, with full publicity and the enforcement 

 of the penalties of the law without respect to persons, so that the 

 chief cause of the deaths of infants in the first and second years of 

 life, diarrhoea and enteritus (which is responsible for over one- 

 fourth of the total deaths of infants under 2 years of age and 

 nearly 1 death out of every 16 of those at all ages), would 

 largely be prevented. Moreover, we know, from common ob- 

 servation of every summer season, that these deaths occur much 

 more frequently during the hottest months of the year, so that 

 our campaign for the reduction of infant mortality can at once 

 be directed to the most vulnerable point prevention of milk and 

 food infection in the summer with the hope of wiping out a 

 large proportion of the preventable deaths of infants by a few 



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