The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [97]
Gorgas’s campaign was one of the most successful and widespread sanitation campaigns in history. Not only adult mosquitoes but also their breeding grounds had to be destroyed. That meant addressing every single open-water source in the city, whether it was a flower vase, broken pot or puddle of water. Gutters were disinfected. Ponds were filled with larvae-eating fish. This was also a time when water was still stored in barrels and cisterns—perfect breeding grounds for the fresh-water-loving Aedes aegypti. Where the pipe connected to the barrel, Gorgas insisted screens had to cover the opening.
The city was divided into districts, and Gorgas sent his men into every home and dwelling in Havana for inspection. It was not an easy task. The locals would often hide containers when the “mosquito hunters” came through the neighborhood, but Gorgas would not be deterred. He soon had his officers keep accurate count of every container that could hold water—all had to be accounted for during an inspection. Barrels, jars and containers were given a slick, top layer of oil to suffocate mosquito eggs and wigglers. If people feared the oil or complained that it changed the taste of water, mosquito wire was strung across the top. Even mosquito traps were used—pans of fresh water were left out where the female mosquito could lay eggs. The water was then disinfected and the eggs killed before they could hatch.
Gorgas also attacked the problem at local hospitals. Fever patients were strictly quarantined with mosquito netting over their beds and strips of paper sealing any cracks in the wooden-frame buildings. Pyrethrum, an insect powder, was burned inside the room, and a light was held in the corner to attract wayward mosquitoes and stun them.
Finally, Gorgas made mosquito control a personal responsibility,sending out inspectors and fining citizens when mosquito larvae were found on their property or in their home. It is a practice still used today in Havana.
Gorgas’s persistence proved highly effective. There was one yellow fever death in March 1901 and not a single one in the months of April, May or June. Malaria rates dropped dramatically as well. In their book Yellow Jack, John Pierce and Jim Writer wrote, “Yellow fever had been constantly present in Havana for 150 years and was nearly wiped out in less than 150 days.” Gorgas himself would write: “It seems to me that yellow fever will entirely disappear within this generation, and that the next generation will look on yellow fever as an extinct disease having only a historic interest. They will look on the yellow fever parasites as we do on the three-toed horse—as an animal that existed in the past, without any possibility of reappearing on the earth at any future time.”
Gorgas would go on to apply the same techniques in the development of the Panama Canal. French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had earned fame building the Suez Canal, had attempted to build the Panama Canal in 1881. The seventy-four-year-old engineer was met with disastrous results and lost as many as one-third of the men to yellow fever and malaria. Eventually, the project was abandoned. In 1904, Gorgas was assigned as the medical officer to America’s Panama Canal project. President Theodore Roosevelt, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who could fully appreciate the devastating effects of yellow fever, fought to keep Gorgas in Panama in spite of political pressure to fire Gorgas and abandon his wild ideas about mosquitoes. Even Secretary of War William H. Taft pressured the president to