Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1897 — SOUTHERN TRADE PROSTRATED [ARTICLE]

SOUTHERN TRADE PROSTRATED

By the Yellow Fever Bugaboo in Many of the States. A very distressing state of affairs exist* in the States of Alabama, Mississippi ami, Louisiana on account of the yellow fever plague. These States have quarantinesagainst each other. Commerce has Item almost entirely abandoned in the southern half of these States and the railroads have practically ceased running. The plague coming at the beginning of the cotton marketing season will work an injury that it. will probably require several years torep, air. '1 he panic that follows the announcement of a case of yellow fever in a Southern town cannot be imagined elsewhere. This disease is the Southern bugaboo.. It is a mysterious malady that travels almost entirely by night, and the physicians have never learned much about it.. The disease in each epidemic is so different in its manifestations from what it was in preceding epidemics that the physicians are almost invariably misled in. diagnosing the first cases that appear, and the plague is epidemic in most places before it is recognized as yellow fever. This has been the experience of almost every city that has been affected this year. Montgomery, Ala., had about fifty cases, it is believed, before the esistenee of tho disease was announced by the Board of Health. Under the Statequarantine law every town, city, hamlets and community stood quarantined against Montgomery. The people became ptMiie*stricken at once. The trains from therehad to pass through the State without stopping, but as rapidly as they could befiled into stations they were loadetl down, with passengers. The mad rush lias continued almost up to this time. The disease has within a month spreruf: throughout the territory from New Orleans to Memphis, Tenn., and Montgomery. The death rate in the present epidemic is phenomenally small and the greatest injury will therefore result fronv interruption to business. Frost is due iu a few weeks and a Jjeavy frost is alwaysu death to the epidemic.