Hepatitis A (HA) was formerly called epidemic jaundice and then infectious hepatitis. A waterborne outbreak was reported in the UK as early as 1896 (Plowright 1896) . A small outbreak of poliomyelitis that occurred in 1914 in the UK was also recorded (Jubb 1915) . Understanding of the nature of viruses was very limited in those early times, and so laboratory testing was not an option and epidemiologic investigations were problematic. By 1967, I was able to compile a total of 36 reported foodborne outbreaks of HA and 10 foodborne outbreaks of poliomyelitis (Cliver 1967c) . The predominant vehicle for HA was shellfish, as is apparently still the case in many countries. The predominant vehicle for polio was raw milk-this may well have been due to using fecally soiled hands to milk cows and failure to pasteurize the milk, but it is also possible that there was some bias because milk was the vehicle for so many other diseases. Details of these outbreaks and further source references have been compiled elsewhere (Cliver 1967c (Cliver , 1983 . The possible viral causation of ''foodborne gastroenteritis of unknown etiology'' was also recognized early (Cliver 1969) . After World War II, it appeared that water virology progressed faster than food virology, based on the study by the US Public Health Service and others (Berg 1967; Metcalf et al. 1995) .