The disappearance of bancroftian filariasis from Charleston, South Carolina
Chernin, E.
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 37(1): 111-114
1987
ISSN/ISBN: 0002-9637 PMID: 3300389 Document Number: 293705
The author suggests that the disappearance of bancroftian filariasis from Charleston, USA, around 1930 was a result of the improvements in sanitation brought in to control typhoid and other water-borne diseases at the turn of the century. He doubts the impact of mosquito control measures in the early 1920s as has been postulated (see Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1977, 32, 140). Consequently 3 or 4 decades of slow environmental change may have eliminated the disease without other intervention. It is pointed out that the cost of such environmental change may well be beyond the resources of many countries in the tropics. [The decline of bancroftian filariasis in the USA, the Caribbean and Australia during the present century also followed the interruption in the previous century of continuous recruitment of foreign labour from countries where the disease was endemic.]B.R. Laurence Since 1930, bancroftian filariasis has disappeared from Charleston, South Carolina, USA (where it was imported with African slaves and became endemic). The eradication of the disease is considered as a long-term result of a municipal sewerage-water system begun in the 1890s, which gradually led to the disappearance of the preferred breeding sites of the urban vector, Culex quinquefasciatus.