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Updated: June 24, 2025
Now, improved sanitation and the knowledge that the yellow death is carried by the Stegomyia mosquito, with the precautionary methods suggested by that knowledge, have almost entirely eliminated yellow fever from the West India islands; but in Marryat and Scott's time to be ordered to the West Indies was looked upon as equivalent to a death sentence.
The virus is conveyed from one patient to another by the yellow fever mosquito, Stegomyia calopus, and in no other way except by experimental injections. The virus must undergo an incubation period of twelve to fourteen days in the mosquito before she is capable of transmitting the disease. The parasite, whatever it is, has never been seen.
Stegomyia, host of the spirium of yellow fever, is also here, but happily not yet infected; not yet, but it may be only a question of time before yellow fever is brought along the railways or caravan routes from the Congo or the rivers of the West Coast, where the disease is endemic. There for many years it was regarded as biliary fever or blackwater or malaria.
And one muskeeter standin' on its head does all that, hey?" "So they say. Also they say it's only the female that bites." "Yeah. I believe it. I been stung more 'n once by females before now. How about the yeller fever? Git that the same way?" "Same way, only a different mosquito the stegomyia. When you begin to vomit black you're gone. And if you get beriberi you're gone, too.
No malaria has ever been introduced there to infect the mosquitoes. In the same way Stegomyia occurs in some of the South Sea islands and yet there is no yellow fever there. We may review, too, a few of the classic experiments that have served to show that malaria can be contracted in no other way than through the bite of the mosquito.
That no systematic effort to exterminate mosquitoes has ever been made in Bermuda is to me incomprehensible, for these mosquitoes are all of the Stegomyia, or yellow-fever-carrying variety.
Living a bare fourteen days as he does, infected stegomyia died a natural death, in the old days, during the long voyage round the Horn, and thus failed to infect the Eastern Coolie, who would in turn infect these brothers of the West Indian mosquito.
Stegomyia, as yet uninfected, are also found in quantities in the East; and with the opening of the Panama Canal, that links the West Indies and Caribbean Sea, where yellow fever is endemic, with the teeming millions of China and India, may materially add to the burden of the doctors in the East.
Lazear was stricken, and died in convulsions just one week later, after several days of delirium with black vomit. Such is yellow fever. "He was bitten by a stray mosquito while applying the other insects to a patient in one of the city hospitals. He did not recognize it as a Stegomyia, and thought it was a Culex.
Much later another species, Stegomyia calopus, just as annoying and much more dangerous was introduced and has also become very troublesome. A few years ago some of these were taken over to Hawaii and liberated in suitable places to see if they would not help solve the mosquito problem there. The fishes seem to be doing well.
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