Contents
What type of disease is yellow fever?
Yellow fever is an acute viral haemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes. The “yellow” in the name refers to the jaundice that affects some patients. Symptoms of yellow fever include fever, headache, jaundice, muscle pain, nausea, vomiting and fatigue.
Is yellow fever a dead disease?
Once a person is infected, management is symptomatic; no specific measures are effective against the virus. Death occurs in up to half of those who get severe disease. In 2013, yellow fever resulted in about 127,000 severe infections and 45,000 deaths worldwide, with nearly 90 percent of these occurring in Africa.
Is yellow fever a zoonotic disease?
Yellow fever is a zoonotic disease (diseases spread from animals to people) caused by a virus. Yellow fever is found in tropical or subtropical areas of Africa, Central and South America. In Canada, yellow fever is found in persons who have travelled to areas of the world where this disease is present.
What is the best treatment for yellow fever?
There’s no specific treatment for yellow fever. But getting a yellow fever vaccine before traveling to an area in which the virus is known to exist can protect you from the disease.
What body systems are most affected by yellow fever?
High fever returns and several body systems are affected, usually the liver and the kidneys. In this phase people are likely to develop jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes, hence the name ‘yellow fever’), dark urine and abdominal pain with vomiting. Bleeding can occur from the mouth, nose, eyes or stomach.
Can you get yellow fever twice?
After having it once, a person is generally immune, meaning that they are unlikely to have it again. Yellow fever can occur in settlements close to the jungle, where infected monkeys and mosquitoes live, and it can spread from there.
Why do they call it yellow fever?
It is called ‘yellow fever’ because in serious cases, the skin turns yellow in colour. This is known as ‘jaundice’.
What bacteria causes yellow fever?
Name and nature of infecting organism Yellow fever (YF) is an African mosquito-borne infection of primates. It is caused by a virus of the Flavivirus genus of the Flaviviridae family. In its natural habitat, it is transmitted between monkeys by forest-dwelling primatophilic Aedes mosquitoes.
Who found the cause for yellow fever?
Walter Reed first discovered that it was transmitted via the bite of a mosquito while studying yellow fever just outside of Havana at the end of the conflict, which was around the turn of the 20th century. Max Theiler developed the first vaccine for the disease in 1937.