The American Plague: The Epidemic The Shaped Our History

One of the biggest summer nuisance would be the mosquito, but more specifically the Ades aegypti mosquito. The Aedes aegypti is the vector for yellow fever and the cause of the numerous deaths. In her book The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic the Shaped Our History, Molly Caldwell Crosby presents the idea that the mosquito is not just the only reason an epidemic occurred in the 18th century. This story accounts for the disease that broke out across the world and nearly destroyed almost all of North America’s population, which some believe could have been avoided by simple quarantine analysis and sanitary methods.
One of the first important issues that Crosby discusses in her the book is the transmission and spread of yellow fever throughout the country. The epidemic started advancing quickly as countries relied and profited from selling and trading goods from West Africa. A big part of that theory is that Africa had the perfect climate for mosquitos to breed. Yellow fever requires warm weather to multiply and succeeds in hot, wet summers when mosquitoes can breed easily. Steamboats used to transport slaves

The routes the ships took into North America were heavily infected with the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which was risking the safety of everyone onboard, especially the port workers and residents around the docks. Molly Crosby references the ships which came from Cuba stating that they were heavily infected with Aedes aegypti eggs. Passengers bitten by the mosquitos would shortly become ill and their immune systems would quickly become compromised and they would die. Since steamboats were the only means of transportation to and over seas, it was the predominant cause of yellow fever spreading worldwide because everyone lived so close together, making it very difficult to be