As a part of our study of the effects of diseases on society, of the, uh, social consequences of man’s diseases, we should certainly include yellow fever.

Now, yellow fever’s a deadly disease that’s caused by a virus, and it’s been the source of many epidemics since at least the eighteenth century in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In fact, it still kills more than thirty thousand people a year worldwide. And there’s still no cure for the disease. However, there is a vaccine to immunize us against it. The road to the discovery of that vaccine was a rocky one, I think.

It’s called ‘yellow’ fever because one of its symptoms is jaundice- a yellowish colour that the skin takes on, because of liver damage. It’s transmitted by mosquitoes, either from man to man- this’s called the ‘urban’ cycle- or from monkey to man- this’s called the ‘sylvatic’ or ‘jungle’ cycle. The disease probably originated in west Africa, and it was carried from there to the West Indies and the New World in the eighteenth century with the ships of the slave trade. The first big outbreak of yellow fever happened in Cuba in 1762 and 1763, and it killed thousands of American and British colonial troops there. After that, between then and 1900, it killed about ten percent of Cuba’s population.

The lecture is about yellow fever, about its causes and how it is spread to humans.Yellow fever is caused by a virus and it has caused a lot of epidemics arround the world.Even though yellow fever does’nt have a cure, there is a vaccine that is used to make humans immune to it.The desease got the name yellow fever because of the symptom called jaundice, the skin turning yellow because of the damaged liver. It can be transmitted by mosquito, man to man called urban cycle and by monkey to man called junkle cycle. Yellow fever originated in west Africa, then west indies and the rest of the World through ships that were carrying slaves.