Epidemics

Issued by the U. S. Public Health Service last week was a report on the prevalence of communicable diseases. So far in 1938 there have been fewer cases than usual of influenza (off 87% from last year, 50% from 1935 and 1936), meningitis (off 30% from the five-year average), scarlet fever (off 10% from the five-year average), diphtheria (up from last year but below the average). Diseases of which there are epidemics:

Typhoid and paratyphoid fever (comparatively rare) are 10% more prevalent than usual, due mainly to cases in Louisiana and Texas.

Smallpox, of which there have been numerous cases in the West and an outbreak in Detroit (TIME, Feb. 7), has spread to all parts of the U. S. except the Atlantic Coast, has struck nearly three times as many people as in recent years. That a disease for which means of prevention have long been known should again break out may be due to an increasing number of children escaping vaccination, to the failure of adults to be revaccinated.

Poliomyelitis has struck about 30% more frequently than the five-year average. So far the epidemic has been confined to the South. The number of cases is about 10% more than last year when the epidemic spread up the Mississippi Valley to Chicago, across the Niagara frontier from Toronto to Buffalo.

Measles is the biggest epidemic of all. It has struck in the Atlantic States (exclusive of New England) and in the Great Lakes region, and there have been about three times the average number of cases. The epidemic started in November and by February had already produced almost as many cases as had occurred by March or April in the epidemics of 1934 and 1935. Said the Public Health Service report: "The number of reported cases is still increasing and so it seems likely that the present epidemic will be more severe than the two previous. . . ."

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