1905

Final yellow fever epidemic in country in New Orleans (Cohn, 316-323; Humphreys, 161-165; Olivarius, 86); for the first time, LA governor, NO mayor, and NO public health officials join together in asking federal government to direct the PHS to take over the anti-mosquito campaign. Successful anti-mosquito approach signaled the end of the fomite theory of transmission, yet the 1905 epidemic marked the first time blacks were suspected as carriers of yellow fever, since they had few if any symptoms and ignored quarantine restrictions in travelling from place to place (Humphreys, 164). In 1906, Malloy-Williams Bill passed by Congress established Federal hegemony of southern quarantine; it established four federal stations and sought, inter alia, to put southern state quarantine stations out of business. It was sectional legislation that left untouched the local quarantine systems of Boston and NY (168-9). After 1905, no further yellow fever epidemics in U.S., and southern state health boards become inactive (172). Southern state PH officials were entirely competent in yellow fever eradication by 1905, but their state boards had come into existence solely on account of yellow fever, and they were exclusively concerned with its episodic reappearance, not diseases such as typhoid and diphtheria, which were mild in comparison with the north. Further, the raison d’etre of southern health boards had never been the saving of lives but the protecting of business interests and commerce. The educational efforts of outside influences (e.g., the Rockefeller campaign against hook worm; PHS crusades against syphilis, pellagra, etc.) were necessary to convince indifferent southern legislatures of the region’s unhealthiness and “the costliness of a diseased population. A mercantilist model of the cost-effectiveness of public health had to replace one measured by business losses to major epidemics ” (177). .