Virus movement in groundwater.

Abstract

Development of the sciences of bac teriology and virology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies and parallel advances in clinical medicine and epidemiology provided the necessary tools to attribute 555 known outbreaks of waterborne dis ease, in the United States alone, to public and private water supplies dur ing the period 1938 to 1960 (1) (2). These 555 outbreaks involved a total of 137,304 known cases. Studies re vealed that only 35 to 50 percent of the outbreaks in New York State had been reported to the National Office of Vital Statistics during the study pe riods. This lack of reporting out breaks of disease in New York could well reflect the effort of all state health