The disease, which originated in Africa and spread to the New World during the slave trade in the 1500s, affects humans as well as monkeys. Typically, yellow fever is expressed within one week of infection. Mild symptoms include headaches, fever, muscular pains, and nausea.
Yellow fever can lead to delirium, coma, and death.
Yellow fever and the yellowfever mosquito are thought to have originated in Africa. It was brought to the New World on slave ships in the 1500s. Yellow fever ravaged Europeans in the New World. The British were repeatedly stung by the disease in the Caribbean and South America. Coastal towns and hamlets in the United States were particularly vulnerable to the disease in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.