These diseases are produced by invisible germs floating in the atmosphere, which, taken into the blood though the lungs, are afterward propagated by the excreta and invisible emanations of the patients. The yellow fever virion targets the cells of the immune system (lymph nodes, spleen, and bone marrow) as well as the cells of the liver, kidneys and digestive tracts.
Yellow fever in its history has been so intimately connected with the old African slaves trade in its rise and decline, both as to time and place, not only at the ports of debarkation in Westerns but also on the ports of the Eastern Hemisphere where the disease prevailed so violent.
The yellow fever is claimed by some to have originated and it have prevailed epidemically in Africa, through Cortez found in prevailing in Mexico, to whose people it was known by the name of matzlazahuatl; and the Indian of San Domingo and other West Indians were decimated by it before and soon after the discovery of America.
The first authentic appearance of yellow fever was in 1647, shortly after the first arrivals of slave ships in the West Indies a terrible epidemic occurring at Bridgetown, Barbados, an English possession and settlement.
Its first appearances in the United States were at Boston in 1693, in Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina in 1699 and in New York in 1702.
By June 1794 British landed about 4000 troops on Saint Domingue, and in that summer a yellow fever epidemic began. Two newly arrived British regiments suffered over 40 percent mortality in three months.
The first attempts at immunization against yellow fever were made by Carlos J Finlay, a Cuban physician who first proposed, in 1881, that the disease caused by an unidentified ‘germ’ was transmitted by mosquitoes.
Careful human experimentation first indicated that mosquitoes passed the ‘invisible’ agent one person to another.
In 1900, Walter Reed and his colleagues accomplished this by injecting the blood of yellow fever victims into healthy people. These investigations paved the way for the discovery of the yellow fever virus and its isolation from mosquitoes.
In the mid-1930s, Max Theiler and Hugo Smith from Rockefeller Institute in New York City developed a safe and effective yellow fever vaccine. He succeeded where many had failed before him.
History of yellow fever