Yellow Fever

Yellow Fever in the United States.

Before the twentieth century the acute viral disease yellow fever was one of the most feared diseases in the United States, especially in the Southeast. Victims suffered high body temperatures, headaches, liver damage and resulting jaundice, and internal bleeding that caused discharge from the nose and mouth, bloody stool, and black vomit. Death could follow in one day or two weeks, and reported mortality rates often reached 50 percent of known cases. Between the mid 1600s and 1905 yellow fever epidemics ravaged many cities along the coastal and lower Mississippi Valley regions of North America. During those years more than 230 major epidemics were recorded. The country's earliest outbreaks appeared in Spanish Florida and the Northeast; as populations grew in the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, yellow fever followed. Transmitted by the bite of the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, the...

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