Influenza : $b An epidemiologic studyVaughan, Warren T. (Warren Taylor)
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Influenza : $b An epidemiologic study
Vaughan, Warren T. (Warren Taylor)
Influenza
“The common explanation of the periodicity of epidemics of children’s
diseases is that the susceptible children take the disease in sufficient
numbers to limit the further spread. The epidemic thus dies out to recur
when a further sufficient number of susceptible children have
accumulated. This is quite a feasible theory and certainly explains the
periodicity of epidemics. The forms of epidemic curve which arise on
this hypothesis are not unlike those actually found, the differences
being no more than might be expected between a mathematical form based
on a hypothesis and the natural conditions to which the hypothesis is
only an approximation. This explanation, however, must fail if epidemics
of different periods can be shown to exist in the same town at the same
time, and I think this has been shown. In London, which on account of
its size might be assumed deserving of special treatment, the existence
of periods of different length have been demonstrated. In Edinburgh,
Glasgow, and Birmingham also it has been shown that epidemics with
periods in the neighborhood of ninety-eight weeks and one hundred and
ten weeks intermix. The same epidemicity even applies to districts in
London. In the West end of London we have almost a replica of what
occurs in Glasgow, Birmingham and Edinburgh. The main period there is 97
weeks, the secondary period 109.5 weeks. In the South of London one
period is that of 97 weeks, but almost equally prominent is that of 87
weeks. The whole evidence, therefore, seems to point to some condition
in the organism which produces the disease as the potent cause of the
difference rather than to the number of susceptible children. Compare
the _Paramoecium_ which under natural conditions divides asexually for
several hundred times and then dies out unless conjugation takes place.
The resting stage following conjugation persists for some time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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