Asia
The main vector (A. aegypti) also occurs in tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, the Pacific, and Australia, but yellow fever has never occurred there, until jet travel introduced 11 cases from the 2016 Angola and DR Congo yellow fever outbreak in Africa. Proposed explanations include:
That the strains of the mosquito in the east are less able to transmit yellow fever virus. That immunity is present in the populations because of other diseases caused by related viruses (for example, dengue). That the disease was never introduced because the shipping trade was insufficient.But none is considered satisfactory. Another proposal is the absence of a slave trade to Asia on the scale of that to the Americas. The trans-Atlantic slave trade probably introduced yellow fever into the Western Hemisphere from Africa. History
Early history
The evolutionary origins of yellow fever most likely lie in Africa, with transmission of the disease from nonhuman primates to humans. The virus is thought to have originated in East or Central Africa and spread from there to West Africa. As it was endemic in Africa, local populations had developed some immunity to it. When an outbreak of yellow fever would occur in an African community where colonists resided, most Europeans died, while the indigenous Africans usually developed nonlethal symptoms resembling influenza. This phenomenon, in which certain populations develop immunity to yellow fever due to prolonged exposure in their childhood, is known as acquired immunity.
Barcelona suffered the loss of several thousand citizens during an outbreak in 1821. The Duke de Richelieu deployed 30,000 French troops to the border between France and Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains, to establish a cordon sanitaire in order to prevent the epidemic from spreading from Spain into France. Causes and transmission
Ezekiel Stone Wiggins, known as the Ottawa Prophet, proposed that the cause of a yellow fever epidemic in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1888, was astrological. The planets were in the same line as the sun and earth and this produced, besides Cyclones, Earthquakes, etc., a denser atmosphere holding more carbon and creating microbes. Mars had an uncommonly dense atmosphere, but its inhabitants were probably protected from the fever by their newly discovered canals, which were perhaps made to absorb carbon and prevent the disease. In 1848, Josiah C. Nott suggested that yellow fever was spread by insects such as moths or mosquitoes, basing his ideas on the pattern of transmission of the disease. Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor and scientist, proposed in 1881 that yellow fever might be transmitted by previously infected mosquitoes rather than by direct contact from person to person, as had long been believed. Since the losses from yellow fever in the Spanish–American War in the 1890s were extremely high, Army doctors began research experiments with a team led by Walter Reed, and composed of doctors James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse William Lazear. They successfully proved Finlays "mosquito hypothesis". Yellow fever was the first virus shown to be transmitted by mosquitoes.