Influenza: the role of the state health officer in the future.

Abstract

It was forty-eight and one-half hours ago that I entered this room with high expectations of being able to resolve some of my frustrations in my approach as a state health officer to the problem of influenza. I can truthfully say now that I am much more sensitive to the problems before us, and I have greater hope of finding the solution to these problems. I am encouraged to believe that significant progress has already been made in the control of influenza and certainly in the control of mortality from influenza, and that we might very well be on the threshold of progressive acceleration of this program. It was barely seven weeks ago that a well-informed science writer from one of our San Francisco newspapers called me from dinner one evening to report, There is a story out of Los Angeles of a mounting incidence of acute respiratory illness, resembling influenza. What is the situation and what action are you proposing ? What must a state health officer, or a local health officer, take into consideration when answering such a question? First, is there really an abnormal incidence of acute upper respiratory illness? In California, for the past number of years, we have had what we think is a fairly effective surveillance network in which certain schools, industries, physicians, and hospitals throughout the state report to us through local health departments what is happening on a weekly basis. From this information, we are able to get some indication of what is happening among our fifteen and a quarter million people. We carefully analyze these data as they come in, in terms of our experience of past years, in an attempt to determine whether or not anything unusual is happening. And, in the incident of the telephone call referred to above, I was fortunate in knowing that in the Los Angeles and Fresno areas there was an abnormal incidence of acute respiratory illness, running about double the normal. So, I could say, yes, the occurrence of illness was something like double the normal incidence, but that we did not