When yellow fever comes up today, you likely imagine a tropical disease. It might only appear as a risk to people in Africa, South America or the Caribbean.
But, the mosquito-borne disease wasn’t always just a foreign risk. There was a time that yellow fever terrorized New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the 1800s yellow fever took hold of the busy city and more than 41,000 people were lost. Despite not knowing the origin of the disease, the city took many efforts to try and contain and erase it.