Insects and Diseases: A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread or Cause some of our Common DiseasesDoane, Rennie Wilbur
Science
Insects and Diseases: A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread or Cause some of our Common Diseases
Doane, Rennie Wilbur
Insect pests; Insects as carriers of disease
The next step was to ascertain whether the disease could be contracted
in any other way than by the bites of infected mosquitoes. A camp named
Camp Lazear was established and the following tests made: A
mosquito-proof building of one room was completely divided by a wire
screen from floor to ceiling. In one room fifteen mosquitoes that had
previously bitten yellow fever patients and had undergone the proper
period of incubation were liberated. In this room a non-immune exposed
himself so that he was bitten by several of the insects. A little later
the same day and again the next day the mosquitoes were allowed to feed
on him for a few minutes. Five days later, the usual incubation period,
he developed yellow fever.
At the same time that he entered the building two other non-immunes
entered the other compartment where they slept for eighteen nights
separated from the mosquitoes by the wire screen. They showed no signs
of taking the fever.
In another mosquito-proof house two soldiers and a surgeon, all
non-immunes, lived for twenty-one days. From time to time they were
supplied with soiled articles of bedding, clothing, etc., direct from
the yellow fever hospital in the city. These articles had been soiled by
the urine, fecal matter and black vomit obtained from fatal and other
cases of yellow fever. These articles were handled and shaken daily, but
no disease developed among the men and at the end of the twenty-one
days, two other non-immunes relieved them and handled a new supply of
clothing in the same way, sleeping between the same sheets that had
been used by a patient dying of yellow fever and exposing themselves in
every possible way to the soiled clothing. But no disease developed.
That these men were susceptible was shown later by inoculating some of
them, when they developed the disease.
In another experiment certain men in a camp allowed themselves to be
bitten by mosquitoes that had passed through the proper period of
incubation and every one of them and no others contracted the disease.
It was also shown that a mosquito was capable of communicating the
disease as long as fifty-seven days after it had bitten a yellow fever
patient. Another set of experiments showed that a subcutaneous injection
into a non-immune of a very small quantity of blood from the veins of a
yellow fever patient in the first two or three days of the disease would
produce the fever.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS
Since that time much other work has been done by independent workers as
well as by French and English Commissions both working at Rio de
Janeiro. The results of their investigation are practically the same and
may be summed up as follows:
1. The virus of the yellow fever is in the blood-plasma, not in the
corpuscles, for these may be removed and the plasma still be infective.
2. The virus is conveyed from one patient to another by the yellow fever
mosquito, _Stegomyia calopus_, and in no other way except by
experimental injections.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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