Yellow Fever

"Yellow fever," says Dr. Fred L. Soper, director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, "is not a dead duck. It has not been conquered, and it has not been eliminated as a permanent threat to the U.S." U.S. public-health officers, who thought they had closed the book on yellow fever long ago, are being warned not to take recent U.S. immunity for granted. Town-dwelling mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti, which carry the virus, are found in a continuous belt reaching from El Salvador through Mexico and into much of the U.S. Most of the U.S. South (all the territory below a line drawn from Yuma, Ariz, to the northeast corner of New Mexico and across the continent to where Virginia and North Carolina meet the Atlantic) is infested with these mosquitoes. In this area-- one-third of the country--the disease could flare up at any time.

Most recent outbreaks of yellow fever in the Americas have been spread by native, jungle-dwelling mosquitoes that cannot be wiped out with DDT. The fever has hit mostly jungle-dwelling people, who cannot all be vaccinated (because the vaccine cannot stand heat, and refrigeration is impossible in the wilds of Central America). But last year's outbreak in Trinidad showed how easily the disease can leap from jungle to town. Army medics point out that the southern U.S., swarming with Aedes aegypti and unvaccinated people, would be a prime target for bacteriological warfare with yellow-fever virus. But so far the U.S. is the only country in the Americas that is doing nothing to get rid of its aegypti.

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