Family Outbreaks of Infectious Hepatitis

ALTHOUGH the epidemiology of infectious hepatitis has been extensively studied in institutional outbreaks,1 2 3 4 5 6 7 the incidence and mode of transmission of the disease in families in civilian life has received scant attention. Pickles,8 Propert,9 Newman10 and Kunkel11 have reported outbreaks among members of single families and their immediate contacts. Ford,12 in a study involving 300 cases in a civilian epidemic, found that 17 per cent of the households had multiple cases of infectious hepatitis. Stokes and Neefe13 first demonstrated the value of gamma globulin prepared from pooled human plasma in the prevention or modification of infectious hepatitis in a group of . . .