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The impression was formed that the incidence of plantar warts was greater in girls' schools
than in boys' schools, and that in infants' departments it was almost negligible.
Such an incidence, if confirmed, would lend support to the suggestion that the trouble is
associated with a change in custom, whereby the older children now frequently remove shoes and
stockings in connection with physical exercises, bathing and swimming, and frequently walk on
moist surfaces in their bare feet, for there is no doubt that the warts are contagious.
In order to obtain more accurate knowledge of the extent and distribution of this painful
and troublesome condition, the school doctors were asked to make a survey of the schools they
visited during a period of the summer term in 1938.

In order to discover the differential sex incidence, the schools were divided in the above
table into boys' departments, girls' departments and mixed departments (which contained also
the infants' departments).
Of the 231,650 children brought into the enquiry, 318 were found to be suffering from, or
recently to have been treated for, plantar warts, that is an incidence of 1.37 per thousand.
Among the 70,901 children in boys' departments, 60 were found suffering, or .8 per thousand.
Among the 70,497 children in girls' departments, 242 children were found with plantar warts,
an incidence of 3.4 per thousand. This establishes the incidence on girls compared with boys in
the ratio of about 4 to 1.
In mixed departments containing 90,252 children, only 16 children were found with plantar
warts, an incidence of nearly .02 per thousand. As mixed departments are predominantly
infants' departments, this result indicated that the incidence in older boys and girls is very much
greater than among infants under seven.

Among 69,657 children in infants' departments nine were found with plantar warts, an
incidence of just over .1 per thousand. Older girls therefore suffer from plantar warts 34 times
as often as infants, and older boys 8 times as often.
The local character of the complaints that had been received gave the impression that the
trouble was not uniformly distributed over the county. The tables therefore were calculated as
above for each of the five school medical divisions, with the result that a higher incidence was
shown in the east and north of London than in the south and west. The incidence in the five
divisions was north-west .8 per thousand, north 1.9 per thousand, north-east 1.3 per thousand
south-east 1.5 per thousand, and south-west 1.1 per thousand.
In connection with the enquiry, five secondary girls' schools were visited containing 1,669
pupils, among whom 23 had plantar warts. This is a much higher incidence (13.7 per thousand)
than was found in the more comprehensive survey of the elementary schools detailed above, but
these secondary schools were picked out for investigation on account of the special incidence
which had been reported in them.