Health measures during the construction of the Panama Canal

[1] The high rate of deaths among workers on the Panama Canal due to disease was the source of a great deal of controversy in the United States.

Newspapers, such as The Independent, frequently reported on the poor conditions workers in the Canal Zone experienced, including the rampant disease.

Poultney Bigelow wrote an article in The Independent in 1906 critiquing the work on the Panama Canal, which was highly influential with the American public.

Among other topics, Bigelow brought attention to the poor living conditions of the workers, including pools of standing water where mosquitoes could breed and spread disease from.

However, between 1897 and 1902, both diseases were shown to be spread by mosquitoes, following research by Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Finlay, American pathologist Walter Reed and Scottish physician Sir Ronald Ross.

The most ambitious part of the sanitation program, though, was undoubtedly the effort to eradicate the mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and Anopheles, the carriers of yellow fever and malaria, respectively, from the canal zone.

Gorgas's sanitation department also provided about one ton of prophylactic quinine each year to people in the Canal Zone to combat malaria.

Gorgas also had the thousands of canal workers sleep in screened verandas, as the mosquitoes that spread malaria are nocturnal and would infect the most people at night.

The first two and a half years of the American canal effort were substantially dedicated to preparation, much of it making the area fit for large-scale human habitation.

Gorgas continuously faced opposition because of the cost- and manpower-intensive nature of the eradication work, as well as entrenched ideas that mosquitoes were irrelevant to disease spread.

[5] In the end, these efforts were a success: by 1906, yellow fever was virtually wiped out in the Canal Zone, and the number of deaths caused by the other tropical disease, malaria, was also reduced significantly.