The case-finding effectiveness of self-referral system for gonorrhea: a preliminary report.

Introduction Gonorrhea has emerged recently as an epidemic disease of major proportions in the United States, with more than one million cases reported to state and local health departments in 1975.1 True incidence is unknown, but significant under-reporting is likely. A control program facing over a million cases per year must choose the general focus and specific techniques that best utilize its limited resources. Except in some special geographic areas, interviewing and contact investigation of a significant proportion of the infected population appears to be an insurmountable task. Our purpose was to examine the efficacy of an alternative to the standard case interview and investigation. Although we recognized from the outset that a short-term evaluation could not provide data on disease control, we were able to evaluate the ability of the alternative to detect new cases, and on that basis we developed a sense of its comparative effectiveness and cost.