Epidemic St. Louis Encephalitis in Houston, 1964

Abstract

In the summer of 1964, an epidemic of St. Louis encephalitis occurred in the city of Houston (population 1,243,558), the largest city in Texas, situated close to the Gulf of Mexico. This was not only the first epidemic of arbovirus encephalitis in the Houston area,¹but an occasion when a multiplicity of medical and allied scientific resources were mobilized to define and control the outbreak and to elucidate in detail what had actually happened. Soon after the disease became apparent, its impact as an epidemic problem was brought into focus by the investigators from the institutions listed below. They drew together the diverse specialized efforts which gave substance to a situation that initially was a vaguely recognized acute febrile central-nervous-system (CNS) disease problem. Results of the work and investigations of these well-coordinated but diverse resources are now available in sufficient measure and detail to give a preliminary synthesis of