Abstract
IN an editorial so entitled in Public Health Reports of June 23, it is stated that the United States leads all the other nations in the world except India in the number of smallpox cases reported in 1937, when there were 11,673 cases in that country. In 1938 the disease was more prevalent than it has been during the past five years, the number of cases being approximately 15,000. In 1936, according to the Health Section of the League of Nations, England and Wales, with a population of 40,839,000, reported only 12 cases. France, with 41,906,000 inhabitants, reported 273 cases, and Germany with a population of 67,346,000 had no cases. Some of the States in the Union have had no smallpox for several years. New Jersey, for example, with a population of about 4,400,000, has not had a case for more than seven years, while the States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming and Utah, with a combined population less than that of New Jersey, reported a total of more than 12,000 cases during the same period. The persistence of smallpox in the United States is simply due to neglect of vaccination, the explanation though not excuse for this being the comparative mildness of the disease in recent years and the reduced incidence compared with fifteen or twenty years ago. The possibility of the malignant type developing from the mild type is a disputed question, but there is always the possibility of the malignant type being introduced from foreign countries, especially in these days of air travel.
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Why Smallpox?. Nature 144, 437 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144437c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144437c0