the early sixties, i was sent by a sanitary epidemiological mobile detachment to the city of sovetskoye harbor, and i was engaged in this in the far east. i am there with tick-borne encephalitis for the population of the far east of siberia and a number of european regions. parts of tick-borne encephalitis represented a large threat. here is one day in the sixty-second year in the journal science and life. i read what i can say outraged. the sun influences infection, which outbreaks of disease and epidemics are supposedly dependent on solar activity. it was an article by chizhevsky. i wrote to him expressing my doubts and in response i received data on solar activity. and imagine when i superimposed my graphs of encephalitis outbreak fluctuations on these graphs. then both of these lines coincided, our first meeting with izhevsk almost ended in a quarrel, of course, the sun affects our lives, but not to the same extent. how diseases can depend on solar activity, as a practitioner, i could not agree with such conclusions, but alexander leonidovich calmly began to tell me in detail how he came t