Social indicators and venereal disease.

Since 1955 the steadily improving financial situation of the United Kingdom has contributed to many changes. In physical terms this has meant better housing, roads, transportation services, and schools, and a less polluted atmosphere. Social improvements have brought better nutrition, longer education, and more evenly spread health services. These changes are widely recognized, appreciated, documented, and clearly correlated ('Social Trends', 1970; Moser, 1970); they are to be found in many developed countries and may be viewed as on the credit side of a nation's balance sheet of progress. Less well recognized, little appreciated, poorly documented, and seldom, if ever, correlated, are the entries on the debit side of the account.