Changes

Contact tracing in the late 19th century was mostly related to the large-scale public health crises such as cholera or tuberculosis outbreaks. However, increasingly medical science in the early 20th century realized contact tracing has a positive effect on other forms of infections. Sexually transmitted diseases, which were not well studied prior to the early 20th century, increasingly were treated similar to other infectious disease. In Scotland and UK, during World War I and after, venereal disease became a public health concern. When contact tracing was deployed, it created many problems for those who were seen as passing the infections, mainly women, and the authorities. While initially in  In the 1920s and 1930s, contact tracing for venereal disease became common. Unfortunately, instead of using contact tracing for only public health reasons, it was seen as a way for the instead used by authorities to track criminal activity such as well prostituion. Additionally, it was used as a way to socially ostracise individuals, public . Public health officials began to see the problem with this approach change course in the 1930s and 1940s.  Instead of emphasizing policy goals outside of public health, focusing health officials switched a more robust focus on conducting detailed interviews with infected individuals and reconstructing the sexual history of individuals so that a more clear history of transmission could be developed. This effort was seen as vital given that during the war years in the 1940s could have led to a more rapid spread because of disease with the presence of more foreign and domestic soldiers in the UK during the period between 1940-1944World War II. Nevertheless, contact tracing focusing on such disease often focused on restricting still restricted movements by infected or likely to be infected women, which was seen as the best way to prevent the spread of infection.  In the United States, in the late 1930s syphilis was seen as a potential public health threat and the surgeon general . The United States Surgeon General ,Thomas Parran , promoted contact tracing as a way to prevent its syphilis's spread. SimilarlyInitially, initially the program was difficult to accept socially and was also seen as a way for the authorities to control specific individuals, but by the late 1940s more controlled interviews and use of penicillin, that is penicillin distributed to people likely to get syphilis as well as those who had it, proved to be more successful. Rather than isolating individuals or publicly shaming themthe earlier, the program simply distributed people in an area who could likely spread the infectionblunter and more stigmatizing approach. This These efforts helped to rapidly diminish the number of syphilis cases by the 1950s in wide areas of the United States.<ref>For more on how venereal disease began to use contact tracing and controversies around this, see: Aral, Sevgi O., ed. <i>Behavioral Interventions for Prevention and Control of Sexually Transmitted Diseases</i>. 1. softcover print. New York, NY: Springer, 2008. </ref>