The new statistics emphasized that gonorrhea is now the paramount VD problem, but that syphilis has moved up from fourth place to third among reportable diseases; that the increase in VD in the last few years has shown up in all age groups and is not primarily in teenagers or other young people; and perhaps most important, that although there is a lot of VD all across the economic scale, the problem is still, as it has always been, principally among the poor, where it is aggravated if not generated by inadequate clinic facilities and lack of education.

Among pending research of greatest significance perhaps the first item is authoritative support for a prediction: that a workable blood test for gonorrhea is likely to be available before very long. Several different methods are being explored in Atlanta under the direction of Dr. Douglas Kellogg, and one or more of them look promising.

The status of a gonorrhea vaccine is better. Not exactly bright yet, but better. The work on a meningogoccus vaccine at Walter Reed is taken very seriously in Atlanta, and the parallel to the gonococcus may be closer. An important new accomplishment which, perhaps alone among these developments is the transmission of gonorrhea to chimpanzees, the first experimental animal other than man. This, combined with intensive studies on gonococcus antigens, will make preliminary testing of vaccines easier than it would have been with only human beings to test them on. Anyway, there is a sharpened focus on the gonorrhea vaccine problem, and there are improved tools for working on it. The brightened prospect is blurred a bit by an emerging complication which might have been predicted: there are antigenic types among gonococci as there are among meningococci and most other bacteria; and it may be necessary to devise and test a separate vaccine for each type. Vaccine work is going on in other places, too.