Epidemiology Exercises: Yellow Fever

Yellow Fever has been described as a "major and terrifying scourge in the Americas,
causing endemic disease in jungle and swamp areas from Canada to Chile
and claiming tens of thousands of lives in periodic urban epidemics" (Garrett 1994, p. 66).
Garrett reports that "a 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia killed 15% of the city's population
and sent one of three residents fleeing into the countryside."

Yellow fever is transmitted in urban areas by the bite of infective Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
It is "an acute infectious viral disease of short duration and varying severity" where
the "case fatality rate may exceed 50% among nonindigenous groups and in epidemics" (Benneson 1990, 486).

These pages introduce you to a model to simulate the spread of Yellow Fever.
The model was adapted from a Dynamo model by Kjell Kalgraf's in Goodman's (1983) Study Notes in System Dynamics.
Kalgraf describes the "classical" or urban form of yellow fever in which a human contracts yellow fever from the bite of infectious mosquitos. The mosquitos, in turn, can only become infectious by biting contagious humans.

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the model
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