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    How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine
    How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine
    How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine
    Ebook71 pages38 minutes

    How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine

    By M. Ward Hinds

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This book details the history of scientific achievements beginning with Yellow Fever during the Spanish-American War and leading to a successful vaccine against hepatitis B virus infection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateSep 24, 2016
    ISBN9781365419577
    How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine

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      Book preview

      How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine - M. Ward Hinds

      How the Spanish American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine

      How the Spanish-American War Led to the First Cancer Prevention Vaccine

      M. Ward Hinds MD MPH

      Copyright 2016

      How the Spanish-American War Led to the First

      Cancer Prevention Vaccine

      The Americans in Cuba

      The war of the United States with Spain was very brief.  Its results were many, startling, and of world-wide meaning. -- Henry Cabot Lodge

      In April of 1898, President McKinley asked Congress for a declaration of war against Spain; soon thereafter Congress declared Cuba to be independent.  Spain subsequently declared war on the U.S. and the U.S. reciprocated with its own war declaration.  In June, U.S. marines landed at Guantanamo Bay, and soon thereafter, 16,000 soldiers of the Army Vth Corps arrived in Daiquiri, Cuba.  The presence of large numbers of American military personnel on the island of Cuba had begun and would continue for some years.

      Almost immediately upon arrival in Cuba, American soldiers began developing illnesses of various types.  As was typical of war experience at the time, infectious diseases were responsible for many more deaths among military personnel than were war injuries.  Typhoid fever was a major problem due to unsafe drinking water and caused many military personnel to be out of action for weeks at a time.  Typhoid also caused significant mortality, but another infectious disease became an even more deadly threat: Yellow Fever.

      Yellow Fever in the United States

      Yellow Fever, so named because the victims often developed a yellow coloration of skin and eyes due to liver involvement had, for many decades before the war, caused epidemics in the U.S. creating terror, economic disruption, and thousands of deaths.  The first YF outbreaks occurred in the North American colonies in the late 1690s, not long after African slaves began arriving. Nearly 100 years later, in the summer of 1793, refugees from a YF epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were becoming ill and by the middle of October, up to 100 people were dying from the disease every day.

      Caring for the YF victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, and federal authorities hastily evacuated the city in face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia’s mosquito population and the death toll fell to 20 per day by October 26.  At the time, no one knew why the epidemic ended.

      Prior to 1822, YF attacked U.S. cities as far north as Boston, but after 1822 it was restricted to the south. Port cities were primarily affected, but the disease occasionally spread up the Mississippi River system.  In the 1800s, New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston were all sites of major outbreaks, with the New Orleans epidemic of 1853 responsible for the deaths of at least 9,000 people. One of the largest U.S. outbreaks occurred in the Mississippi River Valley in 1878 and ran from May to October, leaving an estimated 20,000 dead.  Starting in New Orleans, this epidemic spread up the Mississippi Valley to Memphis Tennessee, causing more than half of the almost 50,000 residents to flee the city.  In excess of 5,000 among those who remained in Memphis that summer died of YF.  The last U.S. outbreak of YF occurred in New Orleans in the summer of 1905 and left over 700 dead before it ended in the fall.

      Although scientists worldwide had attempted, without success, to find a way to stop YF for decades, the Spanish-American War would focus American efforts to a degree which otherwise would have been unlikely.  Events leading up to the war are worth reviewing.

      On January 19, 1897, both William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, by sensational reporting on the Cuban Insurrection against Spanish rule, helped strengthen anti-Spanish sentiment in the United States. On this same date, the execution of Cuban rebel Adolfo Rodríguez by a Spanish firing squad was reported in the article Death of Rodríguez in the New York Journal, further inflaming the negative feelings toward the colonial rulers in Cuba.

      President McKinley was not inclined toward war, but eventually decided it was necessary to end the fighting led by Calixto Garcia, initiated by the insurrection of natives in nearby Cuba against their rulers.  Because of Garcia’s military successes, Spain had instituted limited political autonomy for Cuba early in 1898, which resulted in

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