Page:LewisMeriam-TheProblemOfIndianAdministration.djvu/230

There was a problem when proofreading this page.
Health
203

Table 5—Continued


Deaths from Other Causes. For many of the Indian deaths which occur on reservations no report is made to the Indian Office. In many cases where a report is made, it is defective in that some of the essential items are missing. On the eleven reservations before mentioned as having made an effort to secure accurate vital statistics, the death certificates were studied with a view to learning the relative importance of various conditions in producing deaths. But on about one-fifth of the certificates a statement of the cause of death was missing. In about one-third of the cases where a cause of death was given, the cause reported was tuberculosis.

Extraneous evidence thus indicates high general death rates, an excessive frequency of child and infant deaths, and a large number of deaths from tuberculosis among Indians, as compared with the general population in the death registration area of the United States. It must again be pointed out, however, that all the Indian Office statistics here presented are incomplete and that their defects seriously impair their usefulness. It is even conceivable that some

15

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.