CDC on Infectious Diseases in the United States: 1900–99

Abstract

As part of a series of reports discussing public health achievements in the United States during the twentieth century, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a summary description of the evolution of mortality from infectious diseases, and of public health actions and technological developments shaping that evolution, during the present century. (The CDC is an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services.) This document, titled “Achievements in public health, 1900–1999: Control of infectious diseases,” appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (a publication of the CDC), 48 (29), 30 July 1999. It is reproduced below in full. (For an earlier issue in this series, discussing the effect of vaccines on children's health, see the Documents section of the June 1999 issue of PDR.)The report succinctly documents the dramatic reduction of infectious disease mortality during the last 100 years in the United States and the parallel radical transformation of the composition of deaths by cause that occurred during that period. It identifies the main causes responsible for these changes: improvements in sanitation and hygiene, the introduction of antibiotics, and the implementation of universal childhood vaccination programs. Improved capacity for detecting, diagnosing, and monitoring infectious diseases was another underlying factor in the successful reduction of mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases. The emergence of new infectious diseases, notably AIDS, and the reemergence of older diseases in drug‐resistant strains, led to an increase of overall infectious disease mortality in the 1980s and early 1990s. The report stresses the need for continued research into treatment of infectious diseases and for improved capacity for surveillance and appropriate outbreak response as one of the public health challenges of the twenty‐first century.