RT Journal
T1 THe epidemiology of poliomyelitis
JF Journal of the American Medical Association
JO Journal of the American Medical Association
YR 1919
FD May 10
VO 72
IS 19
SP 1371
OP 1371
DO 10.1001/jama.1919.02610190033014
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1919.02610190033014
AB The increasing knowledge of the distribution of the micro-organisms that are the etiologic agents in the occurrence of several epidemic diseases has focused attention on the prevalence of carriers, formerly unsuspected as factors of danger to the environment in which they exist. The demonstration that apparently healthy persons may harbor bacteria of a pathogenic sort is now accepted universally in the case of the organisms responsible for typhoid fever and diphtheria. Healthy carriers are by no means always immune to the germs which they innocently harbor, as the experience with hemolytic streptococci, responsible for the secondary infections following in the wake of scarlet fever, measles, smallpox and influenza, clearly indicates.1It is not doubted at present that there are healthy carriers of the virus of poliomyelitis, regarding the epidemiology of which much remains to be ascertained. The virus has been detected in the secretions of the nasopharynx not only