History of yellow fever

The evolutionary origins of yellow fever most likely lie in Africa. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that the virus originated from East or Central Africa, with transmission between primates and humans, and spread from there to West Africa. The virus as well as the vector Aedes aegypti, a mosquito species, were probably brought to the western hemisphere and the Americas by slave trade ships from Africa after the first European exploration in 1492.

The first outbreaks of disease that were probably yellow fever occurred in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean on Barbados in 1647 and Guadalupe in 1648. Barbados had undergone an ecological transformation with the introduction of sugar cultivation by the Dutch. Plentiful forest present in the 1640s were completely gone by the 1660s. By the early 18th century, the same transformation related to sugar cultivation had occurred on the larger islands of Jamaica, Hispaniola and Cuba. Spanish colonists recorded an outbreak in 1648 on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico that may have been yellow fever. The illness was called xekik (black vomit) by the Maya.

At least 25 major outbreaks followed in North America, such as in Philadelphia 1793, where several thousand people died, more than nine percent of the total population. The American government, including George Washington, had to flee the city, which was the capital of the United States at the time. In 1878, about 20,000 people died in an epidemic in towns of the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries. The last major outbreak in the US occurred in 1905 in New Orleans. Major outbreaks also occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century in Atlantic ports following the arrival of sailing vessels from the Caribbean, most often from Havana. Outbreaks occurred in Barcelona in 1803, 1821, and 1870. In the last outbreak, 1,235 fatalities were recorded of an estimated 12,000 cases. Smaller outbreaks occurred in Saint-Nazaire in France, Swansea in Wales, and in other European port cities following the arrival of vessels carrying the mosquito vector.

The first mention of the disease by the name "yellow fever" occurred in 1744.Many famous people, mostly during the 18th through the 20th centuries, contracted and then recovered from, or died of, yellow fever.

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