Hepatitis in Urban Population Group

Until the past ten years, the spread of infectious hepatitis in civilian populations has not been so extensively analysed as in military groups.6''7 The reports on this disease among civilians have mainly been concerned with outbreaks either in rural districts,4 9 15 or in institutions."2'8 However, an epidemiological review of hepatitis with comparisons of its rural and urban situations in close-by towns and villages in East Anglia for the period 1943-47 has been included among its other aspects in a Special Report of the Medical Research Council of Great Britain.' The observations of Capps, Stokes, and their associates,1'2" who have described outbreaks in institutions, indicated the definitive role of children and infants as carriers and the control of its spread to nurses through simple improvement of the nursing techniques, which also further confirmed the importance of the transmission by fecal-oral route.1" Recently, an outbreak in a low-rental housing project in Baltimore, Maryland, was described.' Actually, however, relatively little data have been collected in the United States in regard to the epidemiological and endemiological aspects of hepatitis in urban populations.