Panama's Mosquitoes

Before becoming one of the greatest engineering projects of the 20th century, the Panama Canal construction site was first a sanitary disaster. During the first French attempt in the 1880s, thousands of workers died from tropical diseases without their exact causes being fully understood yet.

The interoceanic canal project across the Isthmus of Panama attracted engineers, investors and maritime powers from the 19th century. After the success of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps launched an ambitious French enterprise aiming to reproduce this model in Central America.

Very quickly, the construction site encountered major difficulties. Tropical rains caused permanent landslides and floods, while workers were struck by yellow fever and malaria epidemics. Medical knowledge remained insufficient to understand precisely the transmission mechanisms.

Thousands of workers died in a few years. The project collapsed financially and became one of the greatest economic scandals of the French Third Republic. When the United States took over the project in the early 20th century, the situation changed radically thanks to advances in tropical medicine. The work of physician William C. Gorgas and other researchers helped identify mosquitoes as the main vectors of several diseases.

Massive sanitation, drainage and fumigation campaigns sharply reduced epidemics. The canal's final success thus depended as much on the fight against mosquitoes as on the hydraulic engineering feats themselves.