Yellow Fever in American continent

Yellow fever was an unknown disease until the discovery of the Americas. Yellow fever virus originated in Africa and was brought to the western hemisphere during the slave trade era with the first epidemic was reported in the American continent. It is possible to characterize with greater certainty the infection by yellow fever, occurred in the Yucatán peninsula in 1648.

The first accurate description of yellow fever seems to be the one written in the year 1495, after the battle known as Vega Real or Santo Cerro, fought by Columbus in Hispaniola against the Indians.

Yellow fever appeared in New York in 1668, in Boston in 1691, in Philadelphia in 1669 and in Charleston in 1699. In the US, an epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 decimated about 10% of the population.

In 1848 Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1973) was the first to suggest that yellow fever was spread by mosquitos, but in 1881, Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Finlay significantly advanced the research when he suggested that there was an association of the disease transmission with mosquito bites.

In 1900, physician Walter Reed proved this association and Reed's work led a campaign in Havana against the urban mosquito vector, eliminating the disease in 1902.
Yellow Fever in American continent 

History of yellow fever

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

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is a division of the University of London.

In 1899, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, headed by Sir Patrick Manson, now known as the father of tropical medicine, opened its door.

Born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on the 3rd October 1844, the son of a banker, he was educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, completing his medical degree before the age of 21. Patrick Manson had served as medical officer in Formosa, Amoy and Hong Kong.

He return to England in the 1890s and began lectures in Tropical medicine at Livingston College.

Sir Patrick Manson was instrumental in showing that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes.

His work on ‘Mosquito Manson’ in China in the 1870s and his manual on Tropical Diseases in 1898 led to great advances in the control of malaria and yellow fever.

When he was appointed medical adviser to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1897, he urged Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to create specializing in tropical medicine.

He used his position and his energy to establish, in conjunction with the Seaman’s Hospital on the Lower Thames, the London School of Tropical Medicine and on the 3rd October 1899 on Manson’s birthday the first class met.

In 1924, the Rockefeller Foundation donated $2,000,000 band the school was renamed London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

After five years of planning and building, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine opened officially on July 18 1929, and it was here that the ultimate stage of epidemiological science consolidated its twentieth-century concern with diseases beyond the obvious infectious ones, now rapidly coming under control.

The first director was Sir Andrew Balfour who had for nearly twenty years directed the research in tropical medicine sponsored by Henry Wellcome. The school is now located in 35 acre tract near the British Museum.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine