Virus prevalence in Scotland.

hygienic and prevented our children eating each other's or their own faeces we began to nurture them more carefully and to reduce family size so that we had two or three children instead of 15 or 16. Poliomyelitis was then called 'infantile paralysis', because it was never seen except in young children. But as the years passed, so the age group of the persons affected advanced. I think we may be entering a period when some of what were regarded by the older of us as almost automatic infections (like herpes simplex in infancy and childhood) are going to emerge in the future as infections of considerable importance in older people who, because of a changed environment, escape earlier infection. In this respect inherited characteristics are important because the smaller our families the more likely we are to be careful in their nurturing and to delay their experience of the common viruses. Last of all, one of the great epochs in medicine was the eradication of a group of infections following the remarkable improvement in sanitation that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. All the magnificent methods that we now have for dealing with sewage and ensuring a safe water supply are very good for bacteria, but quite often they are useless in regard to viruses. The contamination of our water supply with viruses is something of which we are practically unaware. We may well have, in the second half of the twentieth century, just as big a problem in eliminating viruses from our water supply as we had with bacteria at the end of the nineteenth century.Professor ofinfectious diseases) You might be forgiven these days for wondering whether the enormous range of weird and wonderful new viruses with unfamiliar names is genuine or just a by-product of the fact that numerous virologists are working away with increasingly elaborate techniques, and more or less inventing the problems as they go along. Actually there is a bit of both. To get some idea of the prevalence of viruses we need initially to take a glance at the methods of detection that are available. First, evidence can be obtained from the traditional notification schemes: for example, that for Glasgow in 1963 shows emphasis on respiratory infections and some of the childhood exanthemata. A similar analysis of infections in the Ruchill Infectious Disease Hospital, Glasgow in the same year …