Volume 1

Yellow fever : an epidemiological and historical study of its place of origin / by Henry Rose Carter ; edited by Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost.

  • Carter, Henry Rose, 1852-1925.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Yellow fever : an epidemiological and historical study of its place of origin / by Henry Rose Carter ; edited by Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pools in the street, has been noted (LePrince and Orenstein, 1916, pp. 55 and 240; Carter, 1924-a; and others), but usually under conditions which have led the observer to believe that the larvae had been washed down into the place where found, from roof gutters and other such places which were, in effect, artificial containers. In no case were these larvae in sufficient numbers to be of sanitary importance.14 The presence of puddles in the streets, or ponds and marshy places in vacant lots, and the absence of sufficient sewerage and drainage in a town, all of which have been mentioned as very insanitary from the standpoint of yellow fever production,15 have no effect whatever on the production of aegypti. On the other hand, the storage of drinking water about the houses, in cisterns, jars, or any other receptacle, does favor their breeding mark¬ edly. In towns with no water supply in pipes, or with an insufficient one, where the people depend on conserving rain-water or the purchase of water from itinerant vendors, water must be stored in containers about the houses, and such furnish ideal breeding places for aegypti. Many a town has been freed of aegypti (and of yellow fever) by the introduction of a piped water supply, and the consequent doing away with the domestic storage of water. The need of storage is greater as the difficulty of obtaining water increases; thus it happens that the very scarcity of water—generally supposed to be a protection against all mosquitoes—inevitably leads to the production of aegypti in the towns and villages of such a country. For the water in which they breed, we would say that the preference of aegypti is for clear, not necessarily clean, water. They are fairly adaptable about this, however, and will breed in muddy water, and even in somewhat brackish water. They breed freely in water to which 14 The occurrence of aegypti larvae in nearly 80 per cent of the gutters examined on the outskirts of New Orleans, reported by the Mosquito Commission of New Orleans (Beyer, Pothier, et at., 1902) is possibly referred to in the explanation given by Howard, Dyar, and Knab (1912-17, vol. i, p. 284): “It would seem that in these cases the larvae were not bred and most probably they were those of some other species of Aedes, many of which greatly resemble calopus” (aegypti) ‘‘in general appearance.” It must be noted, however, that many of the street gutters of New Orleans have their sides lined with cypress boards. Otherwise this finding of the writers cited above would be most unusual. 16 Boyce (1911, p. 26): “Puddles formed everywhere, for there was no proper drainage.These conditions would favor no doubt the propagation of the Stegomyia.”