In this artistic rendering, in 1789, George Washington, right, declines to accept terms, after the siege of Yorktown, from British Gen. Charles Cornwallis. The British army had been so plagued by malaria that at any given point in the summer, half of their forces were immobilized.
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Gen. Toussaint Louverture led the successful Haitian Revolution that began in 1791. Initially, it was a slave revolt against French colonialists. By its end in 1804, yellow fever had decimated the colonial forces.
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In the summer of 1793, a yellow fever epidemic had taken hold of Philadelphia, then the largest city in the United States. It killed one-tenth of the city's 45,000 people. This 1800 engraving by William Birth shows the Arch Street Ferry in Philadelphia.
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In November 1943, U.S. Marines attacked Japanese forces after landing on a beach at Tarawa, on the South Pacific Kiribati Islands, formerly the Gilbert Islands. Both U.S. and Japanese military members were plagued by malaria during World War II, but Japanese forces were not as well equipped to deal with the disease.
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Mosquitoes and malaria were one of the biggest obstacles to building the Panama Canal. Here, a man sprays insecticides to kill mosquitoes around 1913.