K. YELLOW FEVER Yellow fever, no longer a scourge of mankind that it once was in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, continues to be a serious menace to health on both sides of the Atlantic. Classic urban yellow fever, which was responsible for devastating epidemics prior to about 1910, has been brought virtually under control in most of the New World countries by intensive eradication campaigns aimed at the domestic yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. This same intensive effort, however, has not been employed in the endemic areas in Africa. Jungle yellow fever, basically a disease of forest animals but caused by the same virus, was recognized about 25 years ago. This presents a more complicated epidemiological picture in which the disease is perpetuated in monkeys and primarily transmitted by species of forest mosquitoes which breed and bite in the forest canopy. Humans working or living in jungle areas may be infected by the bites of these mosquitoes, and may carry the disease back to urban areas where Aedes aegypti is present in sufficient numbers to sustain an epidemic. In some areas, this presents the constant threat of the reestablishment of the vicious epidemic type of yellow fever. Jungle yellow fever is thoroughly entrenched in much of central Africa, and in the Amazon Valley in Brazil and other parts of South America. From 1947 to 1956, 1,350 fatal cases of jungle yellow fever were reported from 13 American countries. Recent years have seen the northward movement of this disease in animals from Panama into Guatemala with occasional human cases. K. YELLOW FEVER Yellow fever, no longer a scourge of mankind that it once was in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, continues to be a serious menace to health on both sides of the Atlantic. Classic urban yellow fever, which was responsible for devastating epidemics prior to about 1910, has been brought virtually under control in most of the New World countries by intensive eradication campaigns aimed at the domestic yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. This same intensive effort, however, has not been employed in the endemic areas in Africa. Jungle yellow fever, basically a disease of forest animals but caused by the same virus, was recognized about 25 years ago. This presents a more complicated epidemiological picture in which the disease is perpetuated in monkeys and primarily transmitted by species of forest mosquitoes which breed and bite in the forest canopy. Humans working or living in jungle areas may be infected by the bites of these mosquitoes, and may carry the disease back to urban areas where Aedes aegypti is present in sufficient numbers to sustain an epidemic. In some areas, this presents the constant threat of the reestablishment of the vicious epidemic type of yellow fever. Jungle yellow fever is thoroughly entrenched in much of central Africa, and in the Amazon Valley in Brazil and other parts of South America. From 1947 to 1956, 1,350 fatal cases of jungle yellow fever were reported from 13 American countries. Recent years have seen the northward movement of this disease in animals from Panama into Guatemala with occasional human cases. |