The Scientific Monthly, October to December, 1915Various
Science
The Scientific Monthly, October to December, 1915
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The temperature in this room, where these mosquitoes had been
released, was kept rather high and a vessel with water was
provided, where they might lay their eggs if so inclined, but
notwithstanding all these precautions, it was subsequently
found that the insects had been attacked by ants, so that by
the end of the month only one of the fifteen mosquitoes
remained alive.
It is hardly necessary to detail here how seven other men were
subjected to the sting of our infected mosquitoes, of which
number five developed the disease, but it may be interesting to
note that two of these men had been previously exposed in the
"infected clothing building" without their becoming infected,
showing that they were susceptible to yellow fever after all.
The evidence so far seemed to show that the mosquito could only
be infected by sucking blood of a yellow-fever patient during
the first three days of the disease; to prove that the parasite
was present in the circulating blood at that time we therefore
injected some of this fluid taken from a different case each
time, under the skin of five men: four of these suffered an
attack of yellow fever as the result of the injection. The
other one, a Spaniard, could not be infected either by the
injection of blood or the application of mosquitoes which were
known to be infected, showing that he had a natural immunity
or, more likely, that he had had yellow fever at some previous
time.
While selecting the Spaniards, it was often ascertained that
they had been in Cuba before, as soldiers in the Spanish army
usually, and the natural conclusion was that they had undergone
infection; it was very seldom that any escaped during the
Spanish control of the island.
Thus terminated our experiments with mosquitoes which, though
necessarily performed on human beings, fortunately did not
cause a single death; on the other hand, they served to
revolutionize all standard methods of sanitation with regard to
yellow fever. They showed the uselessness of disinfection of
clothing and how easily an epidemic can be stamped out in a
community by simply protecting the sick from the sting of the
mosquitoes and by the extensive and wholesale destruction of
these insects which, added to the suppression of their breeding
places, if thoroughly carried out, are the only measures
necessary to forever rid a country of this scourge.
Besides keeping a sharp lookout against the importation of
yellow fever cases, these are the simple rules that have kept
the Panama Canal free and prevented the slaughter of hundreds
of foreigners, so generally expected every year, in former
times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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