PANAMA: Yellow Jack’s Return

“Take a good look at this man, boys,” said Dr. William C. Gorgas to his staff as they performed an autoosy on a Panama Canal construction worker in 1905. “It’s the last case of yellow fever you’ll ever see. There’ll be no more deaths from this cause in Panama.” So thoroughly had General Gorgas stamped out Aëdes aegypti mosquitoes and the fever they carry, that his prediction lasted for about 44 years.

Last November a farmer was brought into Panama City’s modern Santo Tomas hospital with a high fever. Next day he died. Another man running a terrific fever was admitted to the hospital; he died within 48 hours. A fortnight later a farmer reached the hospital spewing vomito negro—once a recognized sign of yellow jack. He also died, and within a month two more men died the same way.

Like most present-day doctors in Panama, Santo Tomás’ Chief Pathologist José Miguel Herrera had never seen a yellow fever victim. Gorgas, Walter Reed and other early workers in Cuba and Panama had seen to that (see cut). But after performing an autopsy on the last man to die, he thought of yellow jack. He checked, found that all five dead were jungle farmers from an area 35 miles east of Panama City. He sent part of the last man’s liver to Washington. Last week the Pan American Sanitary Bureau made it official: the five had died of jungle yellow fever.

White-haired Colonel Samuel D. Avery, the Canal Zone’s chief health officer, had watched jungle yellow fever (the same old yellow jack except that monkeys and rodents as well as mosquitoes carry it) move toward Panama from the Brazilian Amazon. He knew that it had been spotted in the jungles east of the Canal. Now he ordered 75,000 doses of yellow-fever vaccine by B-29 from a Hamilton, Mont, laboratory. Spraying and draining and elimination of Aëdes breeding grounds were stepped up to the old Gorgas pace.

Said Colonel Avery: “There’s little likelihood of an epidemic. We simply haven’t the mosquitoes to spread it. But we have been warned. Without this warning we were living in a fool’s paradise.”