Infectious diseases took a heavy toll in illness and death from among the first European settlers in North America. While a number of vector-and rodent-borne diseases were certainly present when foreign settlement began, little is known of their history among the North American Indians. A considerable body of literature is available on the history of such diseases.

The arboviruses

Yellow fever

It is hypothesized that Dutch slave traders brought yellow fever to the Americas from Africa during the mid seventeenth century (Bryan et al., 2004) while Aedes aegypti was probably imported in the drinking water casks on the decks of slave ships arriving from Africa. However, as jungle yellow fever circulates in South America, the disease may have been circulating on that continent for a long time. Whatever the origin of the disease in the Americas, yellow fever epidemics swept through the settlements, towns and cities along the eastern seaboard, the southern states and up the Mississippi valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thousands of people died and many more fled from the towns and cities when the epidemics struck. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was routine for people to leave the towns and cities in the summer months to avoid the fever. In 1793 the largest yellow fever epidemic in the history of the USA struck Philadelphia. Some 10% of the population or 4000 people died in Philadelphia. In 1821 an epidemic caused heavy mortality in St. Augustine, Florida.