Clinical Comments on the Start of an Epidemic of Syphilis.

Late in 1960 an epidemic of syphilis started in Copenhagen where the infection had been rare for several years. It came upon us rather unexpectedly, although the incidence of gonorrhoea was known to have doubled in the two preceding years. The start of this epidemic seemed quite alarming, as the number of cases increased ten-fold from one quarter of the year to the next. The group of patients treated by the University Clinic appeared to be fairly representative of conditions in the city as a whole and I shall limit my account to a description of 103 consecutive patients treated at the clinic, comparing some of the facts with those relating to the patients treated in the same institution in 1949. The incidence in 1961 was exactly the same as in 1949 during the decline of the epidemic associated with the second world war. The Figure shows the number of new infections seen at the clinic in the period studied, each column representing a quarter of a year. The sudden increase