Copy of Copy of Yellow Death 6 (6/23/2025)
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Last updated 8 months ago
19 questions
Some Answers, More Questions
Investigation at Camp Columbia
The Mystery Deepens
Evaluate Transmission Theories
Homework
Excerpt from Chapter 6 in The Secret of the Yellow Death by Suzanne Jurmain
1 Late July 1900
2 After weeks of work, the team had finally found a clue, and it was just the kind of clue Jesse Lazear probably had hoped for. It fit in with his private thoughts exactly, because for the last few months—while Reed, Carroll, and Agramonte had been focused on finding Bacillus icteroides—Dr. Jesse Lazear had been thinking about bugs.
3 Since May 1900 he’d been studying insects and considering the possible relationship between yellow fever and mosquitoes. Scientific articles had taught him that biting ticks could spread the deadly Texas fever germ through an entire herd of cattle. From reading, Lazear had also learned that mosquitoes infected with a tiny microbe could transmit the sickness that people called malaria. If insects could spread the tiny germs that caused those two diseases, he reasoned, there was a good chance they could carry the germ of yellow fever, too. Right from the start, Lazear had wanted the team to do mosquito research. But none of the other doctors had seemed particularly interested.
4 Until now.
5 Now all four doctors were willing to admit that something must have carried yellow fever through the bars of that Pinar del Rio guardhouse. Something had allowed the disease to strike a single prisoner. And that something could have been a mosquito.
6 It was time to investigate further, and the first step was to consult an expert.
7 At some time, possibly in late July, members of the Reed team drove up to a house on Aguacate Street in Havana. They had come to visit Dr. Carlos Finlay, the Cuban scientist who had tried for years to prove that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. For decades medical researchers around the world had laughed at “crazy” Dr. Finlay and his lunatic ideas. But the formally dressed, white-whiskered gentleman who greeted the Americans didn’t seem like a mad scientist. He was a dignified, highly educated, bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old who knew six languages—including English—and spoke all of them with a slight stutter. During the day, Dr. Finlay treated patients—whether or not they could afford to pay. At night, he devoted time to scientific research. For twenty years he’d ignored the rude remarks that others made about his work on yellow fever. For twenty years he’d continued to believe his theory. And now he was eager to share his thoughts with the others.
8 Yellow fever, he told the team, was probably spread by the bite of one particular kind of mosquito—a striped insect that was called the Aedes aegypti (pronounced a-dees egypti) mosquito by scientists.
9 That was the first point.
10 The second point, Dr. Finlay noted, was that mosquitoes—including Aedes aegypti—spread disease by sucking blood.
11 When a mosquito bites, it is actually using its long, needlelike nose (called a proboscis) to stab through the skin and draw blood from its victim. If the mosquito bites a sick person, it sucks in germ-infected blood. Later, when that infected mosquito bites again, it uses its proboscis to inject those germs into a healthy person’s body.
12 The process is simple, but only a female mosquito can carry it out—because only a female mosquito is capable of sucking blood.
13 As a rule, both males and females eat plant juice and fruit nectar. Females, however, also need blood meals to help them manufacture the thousands of eggs that they lay in ponds, pools, puddles, and containers of still water.
14 To illustrate this point, Dr. Finlay handed the Americans a batch of tiny black “cigar-shaped” specks. They were dried Aedes aegypti eggs that he had recently scooped out of a bowl of water in his own library. If those eggs were placed in water and kept relatively warm, Finlay told the team, they would grow into adult mosquitoes in about two weeks.
15 The visit had been enormously helpful. As they left Finlay’s Havana house, carrying the batch of mosquito eggs, the Americans must have been excited. There was a new theory to test. There were new experiments to plan. But, excited or not, the team still wasn’t ready to devote all its energy to bugs. Carroll, who still had serious doubts about the mosquito theory, would keep on working with his microscope in hopes of finding the actual yellow fever germ. Agramonte would continue to do autopsies of yellow fever victims because their bodies might hold some new, important clue. Reed wouldn’t be able to do much initially because he had to spend a few weeks in the United States, finishing up a report on typhoid fever that he had started earlier. That left Lazear—whose passionate interest made him the perfect person to take charge of the new mosquito research program.
16 First, he would hatch the eggs that Dr. Finlay had provided and raise a crop of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that had never been exposed to any illness. Then he would have the females bite a group of yellow fever patients so that the disease-free bugs could pick up the infection. Finally, to prove that the insects could actually carry the disease germ, Dr. Lazear would have to allow female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that had bitten yellow fever patients to bite healthy animals or humans. Then he would have to see if the healthy creatures developed the disease.
17 And that was a problem. As far as the team knew, animals didn’t get yellow fever. That meant the infected mosquitoes would have to bite a group of people.
18 But who? Who was going to be bitten?
19 The decision would have to be made soon. Reed had to return to the United States August 2, and it was important to get the new mosquito research started.
20 On the night of August 1—when, for some unknown reason, Agramonte was not present—Reed, Carroll, and Lazear met at Camp Columbia. They discussed the problem and decided that all three of them would volunteer for the experiments.
21 Of course, if Carlos Finlay and Jesse Lazear were right—if mosquitoes did carry the disease germs—a human volunteer bitten by an infected bug could get yellow fever and die of the disease. That was the risk. But all three doctors were prepared to face it. To fight the illness they were ready to take what Dr. Carroll later called “a soldier’s chances.”
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