Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/249

Rh yellow fever prevails. The propagation of the disease depends upon the introduction of an infected individual to a locality where this mosquito is found, at a season of the year when it is active. Owing to the short period of incubation (five days or less), the brief duration of the disease and especially of the period during which the infectious agent (germ) is found in the blood, it is evident that ships sailing from infected ports, upon which cases of yellow fever develop, are not likely to introduce the disease to distant seaports. The continuance of an epidemic on ship-board, as on the land, must depend upon the presence of infected mosquitoes and of non-immune individuals. Under these conditions we can readily understand why the disease should not be carried from the West Indies or from South America to the Mediterranean, to the east coast of Africa or to Asiatic seaport cities. On the other hand, if the disease could be transmitted by infected clothing, bedding, etc., there seems no good reason why it should not have been carried to these distant localities long ago.

The restriction as regards altitude, however, probably depends upon the fact that the mosquito which serves as an intermediate host is a coast species, which does not live in elevated regions. It is a well-established fact that yellow fever has never prevailed in the City of Mexico, although this city has constant and unrestricted intercourse with the infected seaport. Vera Cruz. Persons who have been exposed in Vera Cruz during the epidemic season frequently fall sick after their arrival in the City of Mexico, but they do not communicate the disease to those in attendance upon them or to others in the vicinity. Evidently some factor essential for the propagation of the disease is absent, although we have the sick man, his clothing and bedding and the insanitary local conditions which have been supposed to constitute an essential factor. I am not aware that any observations have been made with reference to the presence or absence of Culex fasciatus in high altitudes, but the inference that it is not to be found in such localities as the City of Mexico seems justified by the established facts already referred to.

As pointed out by Hirsch, "the disease stops short at many points in the West Indies where the climate is still in the highest degree tropical." In the Antilles it has rarely appeared at a height of more than 700 feet. In the United States the most elevated locality in which the disease has prevailed as an epidemic is Chattanooga, Tenn., which is 745 feet above sea level.

It will be remembered that the malarial fevers are contracted as a result of inoculation by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, and that the malarial parasite has been demonstrated not only in the blood of those suffering from malarial infection, but also in the stomach and salivary glands of the mosquito. If the yellow fever parasite resembled that of the malarial fevers it would no doubt have been discovered long