1 McGill University, Montreal Children's Hospital, Research Institute, 2300 Tupper Street, Montreal, 108, P. Q. Canada
What is the practical significance of epidemiological surveys in foreign populations for the understanding and practice of pediatrics in North America? Researches in distant and often exotic parts of the world actually do serve many purposes beyond an exciting adventure for the investigators. For example, the importance of herd immunity, the communicability, and the potential morbidity of measles were well illustrated in 1846, when Panum described that subsequently famous epidemic of measles which swept through the Faroe Islands1 and again in 1953, during an epidemic in Southern Greenland.2 Contrast this to the mild clinical expression of measles in a highly immunized population in Rhode Island.3