Aedes aegypti mosquitoes
March 27, 2009 (Friday)
Yesterday morning I read a photographic archived copy of The New York Times, which featured a column about the awful Yellow Fever outbreak in Texas. The year was 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War.
A very large area of the state was affected, as a letter from Houston testified: “We know not now any place of safety. The epidemic area may be stated as an area 200 miles in length and 125 miles in width, comprising the Gulf front of Texas, at least from Galveston to Corpus Christi; and in latitude, bounded by a line nearly parallel to the Gulf shore, at a distance of more than a hundred miles. Millican, on the Brazos, Huntsville, on the Trinity, and LaGrange on the Colorado, are now sadly involved..”
Six per cent of Houston’s population died in the epidemic, and mass graves were dug to bury the dead in each of the cities affected.
Sadly, they did not know the source of the malady, which was the bite of a certain kind of mosquito. Not until the Spanish American War of 1898 was the cause discovered. An outbreak developed in Havana, Cuba, and a team of researchers, led by army medical scientist Dr. Walter Reed, went to Cuba to figure out how the disease spread. Their conclusion that mosquitoes were the carriers vindicated Dr. Carlos Finlay’s hypothesis, 50 years earlier, that the disease might be spread by insects.
Houston’s population in 1867 is thought to have been about 8700. The cemetery where people were buried in mass graves was on West Dallas.
Yellow fever was but one of many obstacles to settlement and development of this land by our ancestors. Life for them was hard. We should think about them the next time we face a relatively minor problem that causes us inconvenience.