Yellow Fever Information

Yellow fever, or the American plague, is a disease caused by a virus and is generally acute. Spread by a mosquito called Aedes aegypti, this disease can cause hemorrhages and is therefore quite dangerous.
Even though effective vaccines are present, this disease continues to affect thousands of people in South America and Africa every year. It is one of the diseases that get converted into epidemics time and again. Yellow fever is associated with two of the worst epidemics in human history. One of these epidemics occurred in the 1700s in Northern and Western Europe and another occurred in the early 1900s in the United States.

More than three hundred thousand people died in Europe in the first epidemic of yellow fever. During the Haitian revolution, more than half of the army was wiped out because of this disease. For a long period of time, the exact cause of the illness was not found. However, there were many brave people who were suffering from the disease and committed themselves to research so that doctors could find out the exact cause and then work on a remedy to save their fellow countrymen. It was due to the sacrifice of those people that doctors could finally establish the connection between the disease and mosquitoes. They began to then work on a vaccine. It took nearly a hundred years for the doctors to develop an effective vaccine and it was only in the early twentieth century that the vaccine finally proved successful.

After the mosquito bite, it takes three to five days for the virus to incubate in the body. Once the incubation is complete, mild symptoms like fever, headaches, chills and bleeding begin. There is also vomiting, general feeling of nausea and constipation. In just twenty four hours of the appearance of initial symptoms, the disease enters into the second phase which is also known as the toxic phase. Here, the fever is accompanied by the symptoms of jaundice. On the third day, the symptoms gradually start to decline and the patient may in fact feel much better. The symptoms however soon return, this time more severe than before. The symptoms are chronic and the internal hemorrhage becomes very severe. The patient begins to vomit blood and finally becomes delirious before slipping into a coma. About fifty percent of the people who move into the second phase of the disease do not survive.
Yellow fever cannot be really treated and therefore vaccination becomes even more important. The treatment can only improve the quality of life of the patient whilst they survive.