Diseases and illnesses that were prevalent in Victorian Britain are still putting people from West Yorkshire in hospital.
According to figures from NHS Digital, there were 705 occasions in 2017/18 when patients where checked into hospital for conditions that were commonly found in 19th century Britain when poverty was rife.
Of these 705 admissions* recorded by the West Yorkshire Area Team, 350 of them were for gout. Gout is a painful form of arthritis where crystals form inside and around joints.
One hundred of the admissions were for tuberculosis, an infectious lung disease that was one of Victorian Britain's biggest killers.
Some 90 admissions were for vitamin D deficiencies while scarlet fever was responsible for 70 admissions.
Children now receive immunisation against measles and whooping cough – but there were 15 hospital admissions for the two diseases.
Meanwhile typhoid and mumps were responsible for 10 hospital admissions each.
The data also shows there were a handful of hospital admissions for rickets. The total number is not known as the NHS suppresses figures below eight to protect the identity of individual patients.
* The figures count what the NHS refers to as “finished admission episodes” in 2017/18.
This counts the first time a patient was admitted to hospital in the year and so does not necessarily reflect the number of people diagnosed with a Victorian illness, because a patient may have been readmitted to hospital at a later stage with a different illness.
Across England there were 13,260 hospital admissions for Victorian diseases across England in 2017/18 – a slight rise from 13,036 the previous year.
Labour MP Emma Lewell-Buck, who has tabled the Food Insecurity Bill, said: “We now have a system where 14m people are living in poverty and the current government is doing nothing to help them.
“Food bank usage has become normalised since the Tories came to power in 2010.
“It should not be okay that people are going to work and are coming home unable to afford to put food on the table.
“It is no surprise that hospital admissions for malnutrition are rising under a government that doesn’t care for its people.
“By not measuring food insecurity, the government doesn’t have to do anything about it.
“That is why my Food Insecurity Bill is asking the government to measure how many people this is affecting, so we can start to do something about it.
“Quite simply, we are in a welfare crisis where people are going hungry and malnourished and it is the fault of this government.
“The welfare state is becoming a cruel place.”
The second reading of the Food Insecurity Bill is due to be read next week and calls on the government to routinely measure household food
insecurity in the UK.
The Department of Health and Public Health England were both contacted for comment.