For many years now, the only epidemics of tropical diseases in New Orleans have happened in Hollywood.
But, though they now exist only in movie plots, they were once a terrifying fact.
Because of them, New Orleans now holds a unique position in the teaching of tropical medicine.
Tulane University medical school's Department of Tropical Medicine and Public Health is the only accredited teaching unit of its kind in the United States. It has brought New Orleans fame throughout the medical world.
New Orleans, with its own semi-tropic climate and its big shipping trade with tropical countries, is
a natural center for such studies. In the past, it was also a natural center for epidemics of tropical
diseases.
Malaria every year and some years yellow fever . . .that was New Orleans a century ago.
The "chills and fever" of ma laria returned regularly every season, and practically the whole population was subject to them.
But the real terror was yellow fever.
Though there were only a few
actual epidemics, the city lived in dread of them. And once the "yellow flag" went up, the death list might go into the thousands. Cannonshot and flares would not halt the death in the air. The people could only wait in their quarantined houses until cold weather brought relief.
Nearly everybody knows the story of how medical science traced both yellow fever and malaria to certain common breeds of mosquitoes.
Not so many know that the mosquitoes which carry them are still plentiful here.
Why?
Drainage, which has reduced the mosquitoes here from the former swarms to relatively few, is one reason.
Public health regulations, good sanitation and screened windows have accomplished the rest. >
This is one of the reasons the study of tropical diseases and public health are combined into one department at Tulane.
Of 12 public health schools in the country, Tulane's is the only accredited one specializing in tropical diseases.
