KEEPING TRACK OF COMMUNICABLE DISEASES

July 6, 1912

At the tenth annual conference of the state and territorial health authorities with the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service recently held in Washington, a resolution¹ was adopted which, if carried out, should become an important factor in the future development of public health work in the United States. The object of the action taken is to develop a plan by which the state health authorities can keep currently informed of the prevalence and geographic distribution of communicable diseases throughout the country as a whole, and by which they can also be promptly notified of the occurrence of epidemics in states other than their own. In these days of rapid transit in which the railroad has made as close neighbors of the Atlantic and Pacific coast states as were New York and Pennsylvania a century ago, every state should for its proper protection have knowledge of the sanitary conditions in other states, and as to the communicable diseases every state is certainly entitled to full information regarding their prevalence in every other state.