Which mosquito-borne infectious disease was deadly to many new arrivals, especially in the Southern colonies
b1cc67af08a62ea90de0de4903bc919b
Disease in colonial America Disease in colonial America that afflicted the early immigrant settlers was a dangerous threat to life. Some of the diseases were new and treatments were ineffective. Malaria was deadly to many new arrivals, especially in the Southern colonies. Of newly arrived able-bodied young men, over one-fourth of the Anglican missionaries died within five years of their arrival in the Carolinas. Mortality was high for infants and small children, especially for diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria. Most sick people turn to local healers, and used folk remedies. Others relied upon the minister-physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and ministers; a few used colonial physicians trained either in Britain, or an apprenticeship in the colonies. One common treatment was blood letting. The method was crude due to a lack of knowledge about infection and disease among medical practitioners. There was little government control, regulation of medical care, or attention to public health. By the 18th century, Colonial physicians, following the models in England and Scotland, introduced modern medicine to the cities in the 18th century, and made some advances in vaccination, pathology, anatomy and pharmacology.
6935b435c2f6db28b0ae8e13b6c002b8
Malaria Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease affecting humans and other animals caused by parasitic protozoans (a group of single-celled microorganisms) belonging to the "Plasmodium" type. Malaria causes symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases it can cause yellow skin, seizures, coma, or death. Symptoms usually begin ten to fifteen days after being bitten. If not properly treated, people may have recurrences of the disease months later. In those who have recently survived an infection, reinfection usually causes milder symptoms. This partial resistance disappears over months to years if the person has no continuing exposure to malaria.
a5e399aa5908764fef0da86be07119f8
Eimeria Eimeria is a genus of apicomplexan parasites that includes various species capable of causing the disease coccidiosis in animals such as cattle, poultry, and smaller ruminants including sheep and goats. "Eimeria" species are considered to be monoxenous because the life cycle is completed within a single host, and stenoxenous because they tend to be host specific, although a number of exceptions have been identified. Species of this genus infect a wide variety of hosts. Thirty-one species are known to occur in bats (Chiroptera), two in turtles, and 130 named species infect fish. Two species ("E. phocae" and "E. weddelli") infect seals. Five species infect llamas and alpacas: "E. alpacae", "E. ivitaensis", "E. lamae", "E. macusaniensis", and "E. punonensis". A number of species infect rodents, including "E. couesii", "E. kinsellai", "E. palustris", "E. ojastii" and "E. oryzomysi". Others infect poultry ("E. necatrix" and "E. tenella"), rabbits ("E. stiedae") and cattle ("E. bovis", "E. ellipsoidalis", and "E. zuernii"). For full species list, see below.
119e8f05a1ffa60c663907d4c48b1115
History of emerging infectious diseases The discovery of disease-causing pathogens is an important activity in the field of medical science. Many viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, helminthes and prions are identified as a confirmed or potential pathogen. In the United States, a Centers for Disease Control program, begun in 1995, identified over a hundred patients with life-threatening illnesses that were considered to be of an infectious cause, but that could not be linked to a known pathogen. The association of pathogens with disease can be a complex and controversial process, in some cases requiring decades or even centuries to achieve.
deca66bd4c543e1919a7abee219c9f64
Peronospora hyoscyami f.sp. tabacina Peronospora hyoscyami f.sp. tabacina is a plant pathogen infecting tobacco that causes blue mold. It is an oomycete (a fungus-like organism) that is highly destructive toward seed plants. The tabacina is also very alarming towards humid farming zones, like the southeastern and eastern U.S., Canada, and countries boarding the Caribbean. The disease was first identified in 1921 in Florida and Georgia Ten years later the same disease was found once again in the same region of the U.S. The disease began to spread into Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. A few years later the disease reached Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1960 a blue mold epidemic spread on tobacco in approximately eleven countries. There was approximately twenty five million dollars in losses which is nearly thirty percent of tobacco plants. Each year Peronospora Hyoscyami is introduced as blue mold, known as windblown spores from outside the region by infected transplants.
6e51e376a28f2e3a4b9d605e26d589cb
Semliki Forest virus The Semliki Forest virus was first isolated from mosquitoes in the Semliki Forest, Uganda by the Uganda Virus Research Institute in 1942 and described by Smithburn & Haddow. It is known to cause disease in animals including humans. It is an Alphavirus found in central, eastern, and southern Africa.
532e679c24b14f02f823c4c67ee6286a
Hemlock woolly adelgid Hemlock woolly adelgid ("Adelges tsugae"), or HWA, is member of the Sternorrhyncha suborder of the Order Hemiptera and native to East Asia. It feeds by sucking sap from hemlock and spruce trees ("Tsuga" spp.; "Picea" spp.). In eastern North America, it is a destructive pest that gravely threatens the eastern hemlock ("Tsuga canadensis") and the Carolina hemlock ("Tsuga caroliniana"). Though the range of eastern hemlock extends north of the current range of the adelgid, it could spread to infect these northern areas as well. Accidentally introduced to North America from Japan, HWA was first found in the eastern United States near Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1950s. The pest has now been established in eighteen eastern states from Georgia to Massachusetts, causing widespread mortality of hemlock trees. As of 2015, 90% of the geographic range of eastern hemlock in North America has been impacted by HWA.
3d552efdaf7ce8677a17844f15466003
Yellowhead disease Yellowhead disease (YHD) is a viral infection of shrimp and prawn, in particular of the giant tiger prawn ("Penaeus monodon"), one of the two major species of farmed shrimp. The disease is highly lethal and contagious, killing shrimp quickly. Outbreaks of this disease have wiped out in a matter of days the entire populations of many shrimp farms that cultivated "P. monodon", i.e. particularly Southeast Asian farms. In Thai, the disease is called "Hua leung".
480cafa1c970473e9ae8e889f14fca72
Lethal ovitrap A lethal ovitrap is a device which attracts gravid female container-breeding mosquitoes and kills them. The traps halt the insect's life cycle by killing adult insects and stopping reproduction. The original use of ovitraps was to monitor the spread and density of "Aedes" and other container-breeding mosquito populations by collecting eggs which could be counted, or hatched to identify the types of insects. Since its conception, researchers found that adding lethal substances to the ovitraps could control the populations of these targeted species. These traps are called lethal ovitraps. They primarily target "Aedes aegypti" and "Aedes albopictus" mosquitoes, which are the main vectors of dengue fever, Zika virus, west Nile virus, yellow fever, and chikungunya.
97cf5f5600a290102e8f342b514ca3e5
Fowlpox Fowlpox is the worldwide disease of poultry caused by viruses of the family "Poxviridae" and the genus "Avipoxvirus". The viruses causing fowlpox are distinct from one another but antigenically similar, possible hosts including chickens, turkeys, quail, canaries, pigeons, and many other species of birds. There are two forms of the disease. The first is spread by biting insects (especially mosquitoes) and wound contamination and causes lesions on the comb, wattles, and beak. Birds affected by this form usually recover within a few weeks. The second form is spread by inhalation of the virus and causes a diphtheritic membrane to form in the mouth, pharynx, larynx, and sometimes the trachea. The prognosis for this form is poor.
e00f3adff0301b84ec2c8c1322f7c4f6
Western equine encephalitis virus The Western equine encephalomyelitis virus is the causative agent of relatively uncommon viral disease "Western equine encephalomyelitis" (WEE). An Alphavirus of the family Togaviridae, the WEE virus is an arbovirus (arthropod-borne virus) transmitted by mosquitoes of the genera "Culex" and "Culiseta". WEE is a recombinant virus between two other alphaviruses, an ancestral Sindbis virus-like virus, and an ancestral Eastern equine encephalitis virus-like virus. There have been under 700 confirmed cases in the U.S. since 1964. This virus contains an envelope that is made up of glycoproteins and nucleic acids. The virus is transmitted to people and horses by bites from infected mosquitoes ("Culex tarsalis") and birds during wet, summer months.
ca1e112a0dc33d48efaafc21dee69c4d
Harry Hoogstraal Hoogstraal earned B.A. and M.S. degrees (1938 and 1942) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, before his training was interrupted by World War II to serve as an officer entomologist (1943–1946) in the United States Army. He later received Ph.D. (1959) and D.Sc. (1971) degrees from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As a master's degree candidate at the University of Illinois, he organized and led (1938–1941) four multi-disciplinary biological expeditions into the mountain and desert portions of western and southwestern Mexico. These resulted in the amassing of large, scientifically valuable collections of animals and plants. During World War II, Hoogstraal was assigned to the U.S. Army 19th Medical General Laboratory, near Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, where in 1945 he and Willard V. King engaged in a massive taxonomic study of the mosquitoes of that area. Their time for working up and publishing on their large and rich New Guinea mosquito collection was limited by the forward movement of the war and by the necessity for involvement in other projects in the war's aftermath, but they published descriptions of 36 new species of mosquitoes from their New Guinea collections in a series of 11 papers that contributed to an understanding of the rich and then largely unknown culicid fauna of the southwest Pacific. Additionally, their collections, deposited in the U.S. National Museum, have through the intervening years served as a rich resource to many other individuals involved in taxonomic research on Southwest Pacific mosquitoes.
c0c32dce143eb81271e057afe078f16c
Cross-species transmission Cross-species transmission, (CST) or spillover, is the ability for a foreign virus, once introduced into an individual of a new host species, to infect that individual and spread throughout a new host population. Steps involved in the transfer of viruses to new hosts include contact between the virus and the host, infection of an initial individual leading to amplification and an outbreak, and the generation within the original or new host of viral variants that have the ability to spread efficiently between individuals in populations of the new host Often seen in emerging viruses where one species transfers to another, which in turn transfers to humans. Examples include HIV-AIDS, SARS, ebola, swine flu, rabies, and avian influenza. Bacterial pathogens can also be associated with CST.
c444e8f5d01b258b7fc03b9c0b59d4e8
Histomoniasis Histomoniasis (or histomonosis), also known as blackhead disease, is a commercially important disease of poultry, particularly of chickens and turkeys, due to parasitic infection of a protozoan, "Histomonas meleagridis". The protozoan is transmitted to the bird by the nematode parasite "Heterakis gallinarum". "H. meleagridis" resides within the eggs of "H. gallinarum", so birds ingest the parasites along with contaminated soil or food. Earthworms can also act as a paratenic host.
d68385d8488adeb382e49919470d9269
Haemagogus clarki Haemogogus clarki is an arboreal mosquito native to southern Central America and northern South America. It is deep brown in color with conspicuous patterns of silver scales on the scutum and pleuron. The specific epithet honors Dr. Herbert C. Clark, former Director of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory.
36dd26771fd4293b01c46bd57d8d8e7a
Afro-Puerto Ricans The history of Puerto Ricans of African descent begins with free African men, known as "libertos," who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadors in the invasion of the island. The Spaniards enslaved the Taínos (the native inhabitants of the island), many of whom died as a result of new infectious diseases and the Spaniards' oppressive colonization efforts. Spain's royal government needed laborers and began to rely on slavery to staff their mining and fort-building operations. The Crown authorized importing enslaved West Africans. As a result, the majority of the African peoples who entered Puerto Rico were part of the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade, and came from many different cultures and peoples of the African continent.
7b9d3712915b10ffbc440578899dbdb7
Pappataci fever Pappataci fever (also known as Phlebotomus fever and, somewhat confusingly, sandfly fever and three-day fever) is a vector-borne febrile arboviral infection caused by three serotypes of Phlebovirus. It occurs in subtropical regions of the Eastern Hemisphere. The name, pappataci fever, comes from the Italian word for sandfly, it is the union of the word "pappa" (food) and taci (silent) which distinguishes these insects from blood-feeding mosquitoes, which produce a typical noise while flying.
77ec832705d06b3729aa2b8e21a09637
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is an entomopathogen, or insect-pathogenising fungus, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and currently found predominantly in tropical forest ecosystems. "O. unilateralis", also referred to as a "zombie fungus", infects ants of the Camponotini tribe, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant. Infected hosts leave their canopy nests and foraging trails for the forest floor, an area with a temperature and humidity suitable for fungal growth; they then use their mandibles to affix themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains until its eventual death. The process leading to mortality takes 4–10 days, and includes a reproductive stage where fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head, rupturing to release the fungus's spores. "O. unilateralis" is in turn also susceptible to fungal infection itself, an occurrence which can limit its impact on ant populations, which has otherwise been known to devastate ant colonies.
8d2900a211dd005c5dbeb04336da21f6
New England vampire panic The New England vampire panic was the reaction to an outbreak of tuberculosis in the 19th century throughout Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, Vermont, and other parts of New England. Consumption (tuberculosis) was thought to be caused by the deceased consuming the life of their surviving relatives. Bodies were exhumed and internal organs ritually burned to stop the "vampire" from attacking the local population and to prevent the spread of the disease. Notable cases provoked national attention and comment, such as those of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island and Frederick Ransom in Vermont.
79cb690164a1a38e89ca438470c4d890
Babesiosis Babesiosis is a malaria-like parasitic disease caused by infection with "Babesia", a genus of Apicomplexa. Human babesiosis is an uncommon but emerging disease in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and parts of Europe, and sporadic throughout the rest of the world. It occurs in warm weather. Ticks transmit the human strain of babesiosis, so it often presents with other tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease. After trypanosomes, "Babesia" is thought to be the second-most common blood parasite of mammals, and they can have a major impact on health of domestic animals in areas without severe winters. In cattle, a major host, the disease is known as Texas cattle fever, redwater, or piroplasmosis.
b1dba13807aa9c3b8409bd3ed5294133
Slave health on plantations in the United States West Indian physicians and authors, particularly the British, often shared their knowledge of black-related diseases with North American colleagues. Diseases that are thought to be "negro diseases" include, but are not limited to:
3291c651325e8b53cb5316e07826a28b
Epizootic hemorrhagic disease Epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) is a hemorrhagic disease of white-tailed deer ("Odocoileus virginianus") caused by an infection of a virus from the genus "Orbivirus" (Shope et al. 1960, Howarth et al. 2001). It is an infectious, and sometimes fatal, virus that is characterized by extensive hemorrhages, and is found throughout the United States. It is important for deer hunters, farmers, farm property owners, and livestock owners to have knowledge about EHD because of the seriousness of this disease, its ability to cause large scale outbreaks in wild ruminants, and its ability to affect livestock and the production industry. Epizootic hemorrhagic disease has been found in some domestic ruminants and many species of deer including white-tailed deer, mule deer, and pronghorn antelope. Seropositive black-tailed deer, fallow deer, red deer, wapiti, and roe deer have also been found, which essentially means that they were exposed to the disease at some time in the past, but may not be involved in transmission. Outbreaks of EHD have been reported in cattle although it is rare for them to develop disease or die. Sheep may develop clinical signs; however, this is also rare (Howarth et al. 2001).