Yellow fever
Kids with yellow fever in Mississippi about 1870.
See how all the kids are white? They weren't letting black kids
into the hospital.
The virus that causes yellow fever probably evolved from an earlier virus that didn't make people sick. The first cases of yellow fever were in West Africa in the late 1700s AD, about the same time as dengue fever got started.
You catch yellow fever when a mosquito bites an infected person and then bites you. About 200,000 people a year get yellow fever. If you catch yellow fever, you get a sudden fever and headache. If the yellow fever turns into a bad case, you then become extremely tired and get bleeding into the skin, slow heartbeat, back pains, and vomiting. About half the people who get bad cases die.
About 30,000 people die of yellow fever every year. About one out of every seven people who catches yellow fever dies. There's no cure for yellow fever once you get it.
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In 1937, Max Theiler, who was originally from South Africa but was working in New York, invented a vaccination against yellow fever. Because of the vaccination, and programs to control mosquitoes, not very many people catch yellow fever anymore.
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