YELLOW FEVER 



281 



was so greatly troubled by periodic outbreaks of malarial fever 

 that a goddess of fever came to be worshiped in order to lessen the 

 severity of what the inhabitants believed to be a divine visitation. 

 At the present time the malaria of Italy is being successfully fought 

 and conquered by the draining of the mosquito-breeding marshes. 

 In Arkansas, Mississippi, and other Southern states successful 

 fighting of malaria by drain- 

 ing marshes, oiling standing 

 water, and screening houses 

 has greatly reduced the 

 number of malaria patients. 



Yellow Fever and Mos- 

 quitoes. — Another disease 

 carried by mosquitoes is 

 yellow fever. In the year 

 1878 there were 125,000 

 cases and 12,000 deaths in 

 the United States, mostly 

 in Alabama, Louisiana, and 

 Mississippi. During the 

 French attempt to con- 

 struct the Panama Canal, 



the work was at a standstill part of the time because of the ravages 

 of yellow fever. Before the war with Spain, thousands of people 

 were ill in Cuba. But to-day yellow fever has almost disappeared, 

 both there and in the Canal Zone, through proper control of the 

 fever-carrying mosquito aedes (a-e'dez ; formerly called stegomy'ia). 



The knowledge that aedes carries the parasite that causes yellow 

 fever is due to the experiments during the summer of 1900 of a 

 commission of United States army officers, headed by Dr. Walter 

 Reed. Of these men one. Dr. Jesse Lazear, lost his life in an 

 experiment — to prove that yellow fever is carried by mosquitoes. 

 He allowed himself to be bitten by a mosquito that was known 

 to have bitten a yellow fever patient, contracted the disease, and 

 died a martyr to science. Others, soldiers, volunteered to test 

 further by experiment how the disease was spread, so that in the 

 end Dr. Reed was able to prove that if the aedes mosquito could 

 be prevented from biting people who had yellow fever, the disease 







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The best way to prevent a swamp irom breed- 

 ing mosquitoes is to drain it. 



