Infectious Disease Statistics

A major history of epidemics was written by Creighton (1891, 1894). This included a review of the documented epidemics from the earliest times. For several topics statistics from Graunt are quoted, sometimes with a healthy scepticism of the wilder estimates of the extent of some epidemics. For much of the earlier period the author relies on the London Bills of Mortality or their equivalent. The revised edition of this work has an extensive bibliography of outbreaks of infection in the period 1894–1960. Reference was made in Chapter 2 to the Bills of Mortality (see Section 2.1). These returns were used to warn the Royal Court when to leave the city in the time of plague. Galbraith (1982) pointed out that four steps were involved: (1) collation of the basic data from the parish registers; (2) conversion of these individual returns to statistics; (3) interpretation of the information; and (4) resulting action when an epidemic occurred. He emphasised that these were still the main principles of surveillance of infectious disease.