Viral Epidemiology

D IAGNOSTIC techniques for virus infections have been generally available for only a short period of medical history. Because of the technical problems of working with extremely small, obligatory-intracellular parasites, medical virology has developed about half-a-century later than bacteriology. Since there has been little opportunity for the profession to evaluate the potentialities and limitations of virological investigations, and because of current interest in a subject of growing practical importance, it seemed useful to describe the work of this laboratory which has provided a diagnostic service for the hospitals, public health departments and general practitioners of the Western Regional Hospital Board area of Scotland for more than 10 years. A summary of each year's work has been published in the reports submitted annually to the Western Regional Hospital Board by Professor T. Anderson, and the present paper is based mainly on material collected for the Annual Report of 1962 (Anderson, 1963). The illustrative references cited are limited to work from this laboratory.