Overcoming Disease and Injury to Build the Panama Canal by Nancy Schaefer, Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig, and Rolando Garcia-Milian
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ne of the most daunting challenges of building the Panama Canal was not in creating the waterway that linked the world's two greatest oceans, but in trying to keep the people who built it alive. In an unprecedented commitment to public health, physicians and scientists attempted to control or eradicate the diseases that plagued the Canal's workforce. And the measures they took were remarkably effective. An estimated 25,000 people died building the 48-mile-long Panama Canal-a toll of about 500 lives per mile. Although rampant disease at times threatened to halt construction altogether, the resources brought to bear to prevent disease enabled the project to be completed. They continue to benefit the world today.
Ancon Hill Cemetery, Panama.
The two greatest scourges were yellow fever and malaria. Although far from the only diseases to plague the workforce, they were the most virulent by far. During the year starting December 1904, yellow fever hit the recently arrived American Canal employees so hard that construction work was temporarily suspended. In the year 1906, more than 80% of the more than 26,000 employees working on the Canal were reported hospitalized for malaria at some time. As word of these illnesses spread, only the most reckless or desperate were willing to sign on as construction workers.
Diseases The selection of Panama as a canal site was dictated by geography, nor climate, for Panama is an ideal incubator for infectious maladies. Adding tens of thousands of workers who had no immunity to the region's endemic diseases took what had been sparselypopulared jungle and swampland and remade it as a pestilential hellhole. For four centuries, European explorers, conquerors and merchants and their African slaves had brought malaria, yellow fever, cholera, and plague ro the area. Panama's constant warm temperature, humidi ty, and lush vegetation provided ideal breeding conditions for every imaginable disease vector-especially mosquitoes and rats. While locals had developed some resistance ro yellow fever, nor even they had any resistance to malaria. Finding a sufficient number of locals willing to work o n the Canal was impossible. Panamanians were suspicious of French and American aims. In addition, a war with Colombia (1899-1902) depleted Panama's labor force. Thus, both the French and the Americans imported laborers from Africa, Asia, Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean. These workers were excellent new hosts for disease-carrying insects. Measures to Control Illness W ith the failure of the French canal project due, at least in part, to the extraordinary toll disease had taken on Canal workers, the Americans were determined not to make the same mistake. History was on their side, as the understanding of what caused such maladies had made tremendous strides in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By 1900, the "germ theory" of disease transmission had largely supplanted the "miasma theory" that held that diseases were spread by foul-sme lling air. In the scientific community, ar least, it was well understood that mosquito-borne microbes caused both yell ow fever and malaria. Once mosquitoes were identified as the vectors for both diseases, their habits were used to control disease transmission, most notably by US Army
Canal builders endured brutal conditions in the tropics ofPanama.
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