IN THIS twentieth annual review it is fitting to pause for a brief review of reviews covering a great era in the field of infectious disease. Six Nobel prizes were awarded for the discovery and application of sulfonamide compounds, penicillin, streptomycin, and chlorophenothane, U. S. P. (dichlorodiphenyltrichlorethane; D. D. T.); for a means to cultivate the virus of poliomyelitis, and for a new biologic concept of viruses.
The death rate of pneumococcic pneumonia, subacute bacterial endocarditis, typhoid, plague, and typhus was reduced greatly by antibiotic therapy. Tuberculosis, syphilis, and other coccic infections also were so successfully treated that by 1949 the death rate from infectious diseases in the United States was the lowest ever recorded. In addition, the pressure of military necessity during the years 1941 to 1945 forced great advances in the knowledge of malaria, filariasis, rheumatic fever, enteric diseases, hepatitis, yellow fever, respiratory tract infections, and other viral