The Great fever / a Bosch and Company Inc. film for American Experience ; written and produced by Adriana Bosch.

In June 1900, Major Walter Reed, Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army, led a medical team to Cuba on a mission to investigate yellow fever. For more than two hundred years U.S. cities had experienced outbreaks of the disease, which killed an estimated 100,000 people in the 19th century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. The production documents the efforts of Reed's medical team to verify Finlay's theory. Eventually their discovery enabled the U.S. to successfully eradicate the disease among workers constructing the Panama Canal, making possible the completion of the strategic waterway. When yellow fever struck New Orleans in 1905, federal public health officials launched an aggressive mosquito-eradication campaign and successfully ended the epidemic. It was the last yellow fever outbreak in the United States, and the first major public health triumph of the 20th century.

MPAA rating: Not rated.

Narrated by Linda Hunt.