Aired October 30, 2006
In 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 the disease had terrorized the United States, killing an estimated 100,000 people in the nineteenth century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever.
