Yellow Fever Epidemics Research Articles

Epidemics which never came: yellow fever (1883) and bubonic plague (1902-1903) in Baja California

This paper seeks to clarify the epidemic panorama that was generated in Baja California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 20th century’s, specifically that occurred in 1883 and 1902, years in which it is claimed occurred epidemics of yellow fever and bubonic plague respectively. However, as demonstrated in our study they never occurred due to social-demographic conditions in the area.

The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek

Reviewed by: The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek Joy M. Giguere The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History. By Peter B. Dedek. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 262. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6610-9.) While the scholarship on cemeteries, burial customs, and grave markers in America has grown dramatically over the last four decades, Peter B. Dedek, in The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History, offers a major comprehensive historical analysis of New Orleans's cemetery landscapes, examining "those who designed, built, visited, mourned, and worked in these burial grounds" (p. xi). Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Dedek traces the parallel development of New Orleans society and its landscapes for the dead. Beginning with the development of the city's first known public burial ground in 1724, six years after the initial settlement in the area by the French, Dedek reveals how, contrary to popular understanding, New Orleanians originally buried their dead belowground in soggy, watery graves. Not until the early nineteenth century, as the population and economic development began to dramatically expand, did residents begin to construct aboveground tombs for the dead in the city's first major Catholic burying ground, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (established in 1789). Dedek examines the subsequent development of places of burial to meet periodic public health crises, such as yellow fever epidemics, and to accommodate the rapidly increasing population, exhibiting the ways in which the evolution of the cities of the dead paralleled that of the city of living. Interwoven throughout this history are the lives of those who were instrumental in the design of the cemeteries and of the tombs contained therein, including French architect Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly, Italian artist Pietro Gualdi, and black Creole tomb builder Florville Foy. In his examination of the pervasiveness of society tombs—tombs established for members of benevolent, fraternal, or labor societies—and emphasis on impermanent tomb or vault rentals, Dedek reveals the collectivist nature of New Orleans burials, which Anglo-Protestants from elsewhere in the country often found shocking and even disturbing. A particular strength of this text is Dedek's emphasis on how the multiethnic influences of the community—French, Spanish, English, Caribbean, African, and Creole—and Old World (stretching back to Roman antiquity) burial [End Page 706] practices determined the styles found in the sepulchral architecture and grave decorations. By providing side-by-side photographs for comparison—including photographs of tombs in Pompeii and nineteenth-century brick tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, of ancient Roman columbaria next to oven wall vaults from 1830, and of oven vaults in Madrid, Spain, beside oven tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—Dedek aptly underscores both the geographical and the temporal influences on New Orleans burial practices and tomb architecture, which, when compared with the popularization of architectural revivals across the country during the nineteenth century, reflect the multiculturalism that helped define New Orleans society. Recognizing the long-standing status of New Orleans's cemeteries as tourist attractions, Dedek includes a revealing chapter on the interrelationship between Voodoo beliefs and practices, how they manifested within the cemeteries, and how those associated with the religion, especially famed Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau and her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, were at once wildly misunderstood by the general public and irresistible attractions for visitors to the city. His concluding chapter, "Slums of the Dead: Decay and Cemetery Preservation," brings the history of New Orleans's burial places to the present, both analyzing the current state of preservation of these historic sites and calling for greater attention to be paid to the particular problems of protecting these and other historic cemeteries from the vagaries of time, vandalism, and tourism. For those who are unfamiliar with sepulchral architecture and architectural revivalism, Appendix A provides examples of the prevailing types and styles of tombs found in New Orleans cemeteries. Appendix B includes a list with brief histories of more than twenty cemeteries in the city. Altogether, The Cemeteries of New Orleans represents a significant contribution to scholarship on cemeteries, grave marker studies, architectural history, and the social and...

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Tara Inniss (bio) Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 290 pp. 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, notes, bibl., index. US$90.00, hardcover. ISBN: 9781469632865. Also Paperback and eBook. The circulation of medical knowledge, particularly during the colonial period, is a vast field of potential study for the Caribbean historian of medicine. Given the number of publications in various languages across the region over the period, it is regrettable that more of the region’s scholarship has not been dedicated to knowledge formation and exchange among physicians in the region and beyond. Rana Hogarth’s comparative study of the racialization of medicine and the African body provides careful insight into the medical construction of race in Jamaica and South Carolina during the period of slavery. Organized into three parts, Hogarth demonstrates how physicians, and planters, in Jamaica and South Carolina were engaged in an iterative process to construct not only medical definitions of race, but also to racialize the African body, particularly the enslaved body, and ailments “peculiar” to black bodies in the tropics. Another useful comparison is her evolution of public institutions, such as hospitals and workhouses, for the surveillance and control of sick black bodies in both Jamaica and the Antebellum South—or what she terms as the “Greater Caribbean”. In Part I, Making Difference: Race and Yellow Fever, Hogarth traces some widely accepted views on the perceived race-based immunity of enslaved Africans to yellow fever. Even in the midst of dissenting views on the widely accepted notion that enslaved Africans were immune to the lethal effects of mosquito-borne yellow fever epidemics that swept the Greater Caribbean, leaving thousands dead, there was a consensus on the inalienable issue of racial difference between how disease afflicted the black versus the white body. Part II, In Sickness and Slavery: Black Pathologies, Hogarth examines [End Page 221] the perplexing racialized discourse around the disease Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt-eating, mal d’estomac, geophagy and pica). This was a well-known illness affecting enslaved African populations in the Caribbean, and described by enslavers/physicians. There have been many explanations for the descriptions and interventions that physicians have made about the disease. But Hogarth goes beyond these to establish that the very construction of the disease was one based on racial difference, helping to consolidate the medical authority of white men over other practitioners, including Obeah men and women, even though African practitioners were constantly contesting that authority. Part of the knowledge exchange among Jamaican and Antebellum Southern practitioners was over the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. There was a deepening sense that Africans were engaging in resistance to white authority over their own health and bodies. Therefore, there was less of an effort to “treat” the illness, and more to control and discipline the black body. One of Hogarth’s most convincing discussions of the racialization of enslaved health is in Part III, Disciplining Blackness: Hospitals. Hogarth frames the evolution of public institutions for the treatment of black bodies within a continuing discourse of surveillance and control in slavery, even as the care and treatment of enslaved workers shifted from private estate-based plantation medicine to state/public intervention. This discussion is particularly useful in providing more insight into the systemic place of race in medical institutions. Hogarth layers racialization of the black body from observation to pathologization to its ultimate surveillance and control, so at no point is the enslaved “patient” “object” “subject” ever free from the gaze of the white male physician conducting his research. Her examination of race-making in medicine in the Greater Caribbean provides fertile ground for further explorations of medical knowledge exchange both within and beyond the region. It is interesting that she pulls the Antebellum South into the ambit of influence of Caribbean-based physicians publishing on common diseases affecting enslaved populations. Contrary to our twenty-first-century notions of globalized medicine that often depict the balance of power in medical research weighed in favour...

‘We Yet Survive’: Physician Patient Relationships and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853

‘We Yet Survive’: Physician Patient Relationships and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853

Los vecinos de Buenos Aires ante las epidemias de cólera y fiebre amarilla (1856-1886)

This article analyzes a particular institution that arose to combat epidemic outbreaks: the commissions of residents, focusing particularly on the cholera epidemics of 1867, 1868 and 1873, and the yellow fever epidemics of 1871 and 1886. The commissions of residents have been mostly interpreted by historiography as a response of the society due to the Government’s inaction, mainly at a municipal level. This article revisits this statement and argues that epidemics brought about the possibility to create, reform and transform specific areas of the municipal government, mainly those related to health and hygiene. We have called this process institutionalization vector, because a series of measures and organization forms that appeared at first temporarily due to the cholera and yellow fever epidemics, were then institutionalized. We also argue that the unquestionable relevance of the 1871 yellow fever epidemic should not prevent the study of other epidemic outbreaks that were also very significant in the development of the commissions of residents and, most importantly, contributed to the institutional strengthening of municipal governments. From this standpoint, it is possible to show areas of interaction, subordination, independence and conflict among the commissions of residents and the municipal governments and the provincial government of Buenos Aires.

Tree hole mosquito species composition and relative abundances differ between urban and adjacent forest habitats in northwestern Argentina.

Water-holding tree holes are main larval habitats for many pathogen vectors, especially mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae). Along 3 years, the diversity and composition of mosquito species in tree holes of two neighbouring but completely different environments, a city and its adjacent forest, were compared using generalized linear mixed models, PERMANOVA, SIMPER and species association indexes. The city area (Northwest Argentina) is highly relevant epidemiologically due to the presence of Aedes aegypti L. (main dengue vector) and occurrence of dengue outbreaks; the Yungas rainforests are highly biologically diverse. In total seven mosquito species were recorded, in descending order of abundance: Ae. aegypti, Haemagogus spegazzinii Brèthes, Sabethes purpureus (Theobald), Toxorhynchites guadeloupensis Dyar and Knab, Aedes terrens Walker, Haemagogus leucocelaenus Dyar & Shannon and Sabethes petrocchiae (Shannon and Del Ponte). The seven mosquito species were recorded in both city sites and forested areas; however, their mosquito communities significantly diverged because of marked differences in the frequency and relative abundance of some species: Tx. guadeloupensis and Ae. aegypti were significantly more abundant in forest and urban areas, respectively. Positive significant associations were detected between Ae. aegypti, Hg. spegazzinii and Hg. leucocelaenus. The combined presence of Ae. aegypti, Haemagogus and Sabethes in the area also highlight a potential risk of yellow fever epidemics. Overall results show an impoverished tree hole mosquito fauna in urban environments, reflecting negative effects of urbanization on mosquito diversity.

Cuban experience in handling epidemics

Historical data of the Cuban homeopathy back to the 19th century when patients were treated homeopathically, owing to epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. Treatment of epidemics involves primarily an explicit interest of any health system. And in the case of Cuba, homeopaths have been invited since the early date of 1995 to resolve local or national cases of sudden infectious diseases, So, we have solid data regarding treatment of epidemics: peripheral, hepatitis, conjunctivitis, dengue, cholera and leptospirosis neuropathy. In all, health indicators improved without the need for additional treatment, accompanied from a favorable social and economic impact. The results of these investigations are presented, showing the homeopathic method used.

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano: José M. Ramos Mejía y la Medicalización de la Sociedad Argentina

The article analyzes the Argentinean medical view along a period when it rose in importance and became the key for the interpretation of society. At the end of the XIX century, an influential group of intellectuals, including Jose Maria Ramos Mejia (Las multitudes argentinas, 1899), brought the hygienic issue to the centre of the public scene. The main hypothesis of the present paper is that the medicalization of society, after the Cholera and Yellow Fever epidemics, gave to the elites the opportunity to build legitimate domains of state intervention. But the intrusion of the State into the private sphere was not unproblematic: on the one hand, it provoked the resistance of the population; on the other, it stood in contradiction with the theoretical logic of liberalism.

Early-life disease exposure and occupational status: The impact of yellow fever during the 19th century

Using city-of-birth data from the 100% sample of the 1880 Census merged to city-level fatality counts, I estimate the relationship between early-life yellow fever exposure and adult occupational status. I find that white males with immigrant mothers were less likely to become professionals and more likely to become unskilled laborers or report occupational nonresponse if they were born during yellow fever epidemics. They also reported occupations with lower 1900 occupational income scores. The children of U.S.-born mothers (who were less susceptible to the disease) were relatively unaffected. Furthermore, I find no evidence that epidemics 3 to 4 years after birth affect adult occupational status, and the results are robust to controlling for local trade during an individual's birth year.

Memphis and the Making of Justice Fortas

Memphis and the Making of Justice Fortas TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER Ifeel that my roots are here... and where a plant’s roots are determine its characteristics. Justice Abe Fortas Speaking at Southwestern atMemphis, 19661 Abe Fortas, who served on the Supreme Court from 1965 through 1969, is often portrayed as a consummate Washington insider. Beginning in the early 1930s and for his entire career, Fortas lived and worked in the nation’s capital. As a New Deal lawyer, he held positions in the Agricultural Adjust­ ment Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Interior Department. Afterward, he helped build the D.C. law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter, advising top corporate clients and taking on high-profile loyalty cases during the Mc­ Carthy Era. Along the way, he assisted Texas Congressman Lyndon Johnson in winning a disputed U.S. Senate election, thus cementing a lifelong friendship with a future President that culminated in an appointment to the Supreme Court. After his controversial nomination to be Chief Justice and his resignation from the Court, he continued to practice law until his 1982 death at his residence in Georgetown. But long before he became known as a wealthy Washington power broker, Fortas grew up in an immigrant Jewish family of modest means in Memphis, Tennessee. Justice Fortas was a creature of Washington, to be sure, but he was also in many ways a product of his hometown.2 Growing Up in Memphis The city into which Fortas was bom still bore resemblance to a rough river town. Located on a bluff in the southwest comer of Tennessee, Memphis lay just across the Mississippi River from Arkansas and just north of the Mississippi state line. It had grown up as an outpost for lawless flatboatmen in the early nineteenth century—a place for brawlers, gamblers, and desperados of every sort—and later, as steamboats began to MEMPHIS AND ABE FORTAS 315 ply the river, it emerged as a bustling center for slave traders and cotton planters. Occu­ pied by Union forces but spared physical destruction during the Civil War, Memphis in the 1870s endured repeated epidemics of Yellow Fever, which led to death, desertion, and de-population on a massive scale. But the last two decades of the century brought an economic and demographic resurgence, as new residents, black and white, flooded into the city from surrounding rural areas. Cotton, hardwood, and, ofcourse, river transportation dominated the economy, and the opening ofa railroad bridge across the Mississippi River in 1895, the third-longest bridge in the world at the time, transformed the city into a regional hub for trade. By the turn of the century, Memphis topped 100,000 residents, making it the second-largest city in the states ofthe Old Confederacy. Heavily Protestant and racially divided, the city was also known for its ethnic and cultural diversity, as significant numbers of Irish, Italians, and Jews called the city home. Despite its rapid growth and rebirth, high rates of murder and crime still dragged down the city’s reputation.3 Abe Fortas’s parents arrived in Memphis from England in 1905. Woolf Fortas and his wife Ray, as they were listed in the census, were originally from Russia and Lithuania, respectively, and they came to Memphis to join Woolfs older brother Joseph, who, after having immigrated decades before, managed a furniture factory in the Bluff City.4 Although Joseph and his family rented a home in the “Pinch” district of Memphis, a predominantly Irish and Jewish neighbor­ hood on the north end, Woolfand Ray bought a home on McLemore Avenue on the south side of town. The Fortases, who later appeared in the census as “William” and “Rachel,” had three children at the time of their arrival—Mary, Nellie, and Meyer. A fourth, Esta, came along in 1907. The youngest—listed in the Shelby County Birth Records as “Abaram” but elsewhere always as “Abe”—was bom on June 19, 1910.5 William Fortas initially worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker in the Fortas furniture factory, but for reasons that are unknown, in 1919 he parted ways with his older brother to start a business of his own. Success seemed to elude him...

VECTOR ASPECTS IN RISK AREAS FOR SYLVATIC YELLOW FEVER IN THE STATE OF MATO GROSSO DO SUL, BRAZIL

As epidemias e epizootias de febre amarela ocorridas em 2008 no Brasil, Paraguai e Argentina marcaram um expressivo avanço da doença para o sul do continente, afetando populações humanas não vacinadas. O estado de Mato Grosso do Sul encontra-se na transição entre a região endêmica tropical e a epidêmica subtropical e, apesar de ser considerado área de recomendação para vacinação desde a década de 1980, ainda registra casos humanos e epizootias. O objetivo deste trabalho foi apresentar os resultados de levantamentos entomológicos em locais de casos humanos e epizootias notificados como suspeitos em 2008, descrevendo geograficamente essas áreas. Foram investigadas 13 localidades em nove municípios, tendo sido obtidas 305 fêmeas dos gêneros Haemagogus e Sabethes, além de cinco espécimes de Aedes albopictus. O gênero Haemagogus foi mais abundante, mas Sabethes apresentou o dobro de espécies (3 x 6) e maior distribuição entre os pontos de coleta. A espécie mais abundante foi Hg. janthinomys, porém com 102 indivíduos em um único local. As demais espécies encontradas foram: Hg. leucocelaenus, Hg.spegazzinii, Sa. albiprivus, Sa. belisarioi, Sa. chloropterus, Sa. glaucodaemun, Sa. intermedius e Sa. soperi. Não foi possível identificar tendências de preferência das espécies em relação aos atributos ambientais e geográficos descritos para os pontos de coleta. Dos nove casos humanos, oito corresponderam a pessoas não residentes no estado, sendo sete turistas. O estado de Mato Grosso do Sul reúne grande diversidade de atrativos turísticos relacionados com ambientes rurais e silvestres, onde o homem pode entrar em contato com os vetores da febre amarela encontrados neste trabalho. Nesse sentido, o monitoramento da cobertura vacinal e do fluxo de pessoas não vacinadas é fundamental para o controle da doença.

A Yellow Fever Epidemic: A New Global Health Emergency?

This Viewpoint discusses the yellow fever epidemic in Angola as well as in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya due to cases arising from infected travelers from Angola.

Health Care in America: A History

In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases. Drawing on primary sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several eras: physiological medicine (1910s-1930s), antibiotics (1930s-1950s), technology (1950s-1960s), environmental medicine (1970s-1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The cumulating developments in each era led to today's radically altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions that swirl around the financial cost of health care. Burnham's sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a new understanding of our current concerns.

Threat from Emerging Vectorborne Viruses

The earliest members of genus Homo were surely bedeviled by blood-feeding arthropods, some of which doubtless carried zoonotic pathogens. However, the phenomenon of vectorborne human epidemic disease began only after humans began building settlements 15,000 years ago (1). Settlements offered pathogens not only host density but also opportunities for their vertebrate reservoirs and arthropod vectors to cohabit with us. Epidemic Yersinia pestis (the Medieval Black Death) was only possible because black rats (Rattus rattus), the host of the vector flea, had become extraordinarily successful at living off human garbage and nesting in our buildings.

Debating the Atmospheric Constitution: Yellow Fever and the American Climate

A series of deadly epidemics of yellow fever ravaged Philadelphia and other eastern seaboard cities of the United States in the 1790s. Although medical opinion failed to reach consensus on the causes of the outbreaks, the events substantially influenced American thinking about the benevolence and improvability of the national climate. The belief that climate was being civilized by extending cultivation across the continent gave way to a concern with improving the quality of air in specific urban locations. Measures to enhance urban sanitation arose from the debate over the American “atmospheric constitution” that was stimulated by the yellow fever epidemics.

Assessment of Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response Implementation in Special Health Facilities of Dawuro Zone

Background: Widespread epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, meningitis and Tuberculosis across the Sub-Saharan African in the 1990s were largely attributed to poor surveillance systems which were neither able to detect communicable diseases on time nor build up an effective response. Effective communicable disease control relies on effective response systems which are dependent upon effective disease surveillance. Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response strategy (IDSR) was adopted by the AFRO members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to improve surveillance activities. Objective: This study was conducted to assess IDSR implementation in selected Health Facilities of Dawuro zone. Settings and Design: Dawuro zone is located in Southwestern Ethiopia. It shares borders with the Gamo-Gofa zone in south, Wolayta zone in the east, Konta Special district in the west, Oromia region in North, Hadya and Kambata Tembaro Zones in North east. Based on the 2006 census, it has a population of 590,090. A cross-sectional facility based descriptive study was conducted. Materials and Methods: An interviewer administered questionnaire of an adapted from the WHO Protocol for the Assessment of National Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response systems was used. Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 21. Results: All of the health facilities (38%) have any case definition for the priority diseases. About 43% of the health facilities had electricity. Only seven percent has standby generators, which were functional. All health centers had calculators and stationery available for data management while 36% had computers and but 28% have printers available. No form of data analysis was available in 93% of the health centers, analysis of data were however available in all 14 Health centers studied. A reporting system was available in 92% of health centers. There was no feedback from the region to the district health offices and Health centers, nor was there feedback from the national to the zone level. Conclusion and recommendation: The implementation of IDSR in Dawuro zone is moderate. Resources are insufficient and although some structures are present on ground like the presence of reporting mechanism, feedback is low from the higher to lower levels. Standard case definitions are not used in all health facilities for all priority diseases. Standard case definitions should be made available and used in all health facilities.

“Until Cleansed and Purified”: Landscapes of Health in the Interpermeable World

The Lazaretto quarantine station on the Delaware River was built beginning in 1799, in the aftermath of four devastating yellow fever epidemics, to protect Philadelphia from imported disease. Although historians of quarantine have focused on debates over the contagiousness of various diseases, far more important than the danger of contagion in the Lazaretto’s operations was “infection” in the ships themselves and in their cargo. This paper explores the elusive and misunderstood concept of “infection” in the nineteenth century through an examination of detention criteria and disinfection—or “purification”—procedures at the Lazaretto, as well as the rationale for the location of the quarantine station itself. I suggest that the critical elements of disinfection were not chemicals, but time and air—ideally, a particular kind of air in a particular kind of place. I also sketch the outlines of the “interpermeable world” prior to the Bacteriological Revolution, in which air, earth, water, and bodies were perceived as mutually permeable and always potentially health-promoting and pathogenic to varying degrees.

Twenty-Three Years after the First Record ofAedes albopictusin Nigeria: Its Current Distribution and Potential Epidemiological Implications

Aedes albopictus (Skuse) was first recorded in Nigeria in 1991 during a post epidemiological surveillance of yellow fever epidemics in Delta State. In this report, we present a map of the current distribution of Ae. albopictus and its possible epidemiological implications based on accessible records of mosquito fauna in Nigeria using electronic e-journal searching engines. We also report the results of a field study on population dominance between Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus in a woodland habitat in southwestern Nigeria between March and November 2002. Of over 100 accessible papers on mosquito fauna in Nigeria, only 18 have reported information on Ae. albopictus. Literature shows that Ae. albopictus became well established in southeastern Nigeria and then spread to other southern regions. There was no information about the species in northern Nigeria except Kano where a record of its breeding was reported. Data showed dominance of Ae. albopictus over Ae. aegypti in southeastern Nigeria but the revers...

Historic Disease Data as Epidemiological Resource: Searching for the Origin and Local Basic Reproduction Number of the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee

Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases continue to pose considerable regional and global concerns. A vital contribution to be made by geographers is in developing an understanding of the spatial structure of these epidemics across various scales. Confidentiality concerns and a general lack of individual data from many developing world areas mean that individual or subneighborhood-scale epidemic information is often unavailable. One alternative potential source of data is historical epidemics. Although these data exist in the form of board of health reports, these should not be considered complete, and the onus is on the researcher to perform due diligence on data validation and identifying supplementary spatial and cultural context. This article presents an example of such a methodological task for the 1878 yellow fever epidemic of Memphis, which leads to exploration of two important spatial questions: the correct origin of the epidemic in the city and its associated local basic reproduction number, which is the number of ensuing cases stemming from an original. This article should be viewed as a template for a subsequent series of fine-scale historical epidemic analyses, which together can produce an important conduit into further development of spatial epidemiological theory.

La dengue et autres infections à flavivirus

Flaviviruses are responsible for yellow fever, Zika fever and dengue, all of which are major human diseases found in tropical regions of the globe. They are zoonoses with a transmission cycle that involves primates as reservoirs and mosquitoes of the genus Aedes as vectors. The recent upsurge of urban epidemics of yellow fever, Zika fever and dengue has involved human-to-human transmission with mosquitoes as the vector. This paper is primarily concerned with dengue, which has become the pre-eminent arbovirosis in terms of public health.