Better Brush Your Teeth; Don't Wanna Get Yellow Fever

For the third Action Project of my Disease class, my peers and I were assigned to choose an epidemic that affected a population. The third unit of Disease is called "World," and that is exactly what we studied. We discussed, throughout the unit, how diseases affect the world; hence the term: epidemic. I chose Yellow Fever, a disease transmitted from Mosquitoes. Specifically, the Yellow Fever outbreak in Barcelona, Spain in 1821. I chose this epidemic because Yellow Fever has always been very interesting to me because there's so many Mosquitoes in the world and one could possibly end your life. This is even more interesting because I got bit by hundreds of them over the last summer. This project was not easy, but as usual, it was super fun to complete!

Below is a visual of some places that were affected by my disease:

What is Yellow Fever? Thanks for asking! Yellow Fever is a disease that you can get from Mosquitoes, normally in Tropical South Africa. The species of the mosquito is: Aedes Aegypti. Yellow Fever is commonly transmitted by the female mosquito. This disease can also affect other species of Mosquitoes. Yellow Fever annually kills 30,000 people a year and infects 200,000 people a year. Yellow Fever was the first ever human virus; discovered on the island of Barbados, in 1647.

Some symptoms of Yellow Fever are harsh fever, lost of appetite, nausea, muscle pains, mostly in back and head. In some cases, the fever keeps coming back or the body pains keep coming back, or your skin begins to turn yellow, which really makes this disease even more fatal. It can also cause kidney problems and hear failure which results in death!

The specific Epidemic I am targeting is the Yellow Fever outbreak in Barcelona, Spain, 1821. The outbreak happened through the docks coming from Cuba, apparently a brick was contagious and it got transported to people within Barcelona. It first started to affect the urban poor suburbs of Barcelona, then made its way to the center of the city. An estimated 20,000/120,000 died from the disease. That's a whole 1/6 of the FULL population of Barcelona at the time!! A quarantine was put into immediate effect, due to this epidemic. It was controlled by an estimated 15,000 soldiers! This quarantine seemed to be one of the main forms of resistance towards the disease and may be he cause of its decline. I would have suggested that the people of Barcelona use ovitraps. Ovitraps are traps that trap the eggs of insects. This idea will not only reduce mosquito populations, but it will reduce pesticides which can be harmful to humans and plants. 

Generally, a disease as fatal as yellow fever and since it can be transmitted by an insect, (mosquito) then it is definitely a potential epidemic or pandemic. So on a R Naught scale, I would say this disease is over 1. This also means that this disease has the potential to spread out of control and does not decline.

In my images you will find some patterns or epidemics I found interesting, relating to my epidemic. I used a software named GapMinder to find some relevant patterns in the way that epidemics affect other places around the same time as mine. GapMinder is a graphing program where it shows you different kinds of statistics for different countries. Something like TV sales and suicide rates. Just random things like these are examples of what you can do on GapMinder. Playing around with it, I learned about how Epidemics affected population and how drought affected population.

In the photos, you will see that I am using the software and on the software, you will see that my main out-liers are China and Indonesia in the first picture. Meaning that there was most activity in those two countries when a drought occurred. Now this is important because the holder of my disease are mosquitoes. I bet you can't guess what mosquitoes eat! They drink water, and without any water, a lot of mosquitoes die. My second image has China and India as out-liers. Now, this set of data represents populations as epidemics were happening. I found it super interesting that India and China stayed really strong in numbers, even though they are hugely populated countries.

References:
"[The "plague" of Barcelona. Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1821]." NCBI. U.S. National Library of Medicine, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.

"Gapminder." Gapminder. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.