Venereal Diseases.

For many years in each of the Canadian provinces, the law has required that any person suffering from or suspected to be suffering from a venereal disease shall place himself under the care of a physician, and it has been the duty of that physician to report such cases to the Provincial Department of Health. It was not until 1944, however, that, as the result of a recommendation of the Dominion Council of Health, a Federal-Provincial advisory body, machinery was set up to collect venereal disease incidence figures on a systematic and comparable basis for the whole country. At that time, a standard and confidential notification form (Form N.H. 1, Fig. 1, opposite page) was introduced for the use of physicians in reporting to Provincial Departments of Health, which in turn transmitted weekly summaries to the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. With minor modifications, this system of reporting venereal diseases has been continued -to the present time. Concurrently with improved reporting, the provincial public health laboratory directors, together with the national Laboratory of Hygiene, participated in a programme to standardize the performance and interpretation of serological tests for syphilis throughout Canada. Although it is presumed that the high incidence rates of venereal diseases in military personnel during the two world wars were paralleled by increased rates in the civilian population, accurate venereal disease statistics on a national basis are not available before 1944. It is necessary when examining trends with any degree of confidence, to confine attention to the period subsequent to the second world war. It is apparent from Fig. 2 that Canada, in common with many other countries, has been favoured with a dramatic decline in venereal disease rates since the post-war peak of,1946. Since that year the rate for total venereal disease has been reduced from 337-2 per 100,000 to 107-9 per 100,000 in 1955, a decline of 68-0 per cent. Syphilis of all types has declined steadily year by year from a rate of 137 8 per 100,000 in 1944, to 15 5 per 100,000 in 1955, a reduction of 88 7 per cent. Since 1946 the incidence of gonorrhoea has decreased from 214 0 per 100,000 to 923 per 100,000, a decline of 56 8 per cent. It is significant that since 1951 the reported incidence of