EXHIBITS

Bushnell Days: Tropical Diseases at Bushnell

Tropical Diseases at Bushnell

Malaria is caused by a parasite which is spread by the bite of mosquitoes. The outbreak of malaria in Brigham City, UT, around Bushnell Hospital led to efforts to quarantine soldiers with tropical diseases and eradicate local mosquitoes.

Many patients at Bushnell came from battlefields in the Pacific where they had been exposed to malaria and other tropical diseases, and some brought these diseases with them to Utah. In 1943, malaria spread from Bushnell to Brigham City. The local epidemic prompted mosquito eradication programs in the area to keep it free from the tropical diseases being imported from the Pacific Theater.

Bushnell Hospital and Brigham City in 1943. The hospital’s proximity to Brigham City, just to the north, led to concerns about an outbreak of malaria and other tropical diseases brought back from the Pacific Theater by ill and wounded veterans.

Members of the armed forces infected with malaria in tropical regions could bring the disease home to the United States.

Bushnell’s Ward 26 was set aside as a quarantine area for tropical diseases. Patients in the ward lived and slept under mosquito netting and doctors were careful not to allow any potential contact between them and the local mosquito population that might spread the disease. Bushnell ended up being one of three US hospitals that experimented with new malaria treatments, looking for an elusive cure for the disease.

Sources for this Page

“Bushnell Hospital Pushes Study of Malarial Fever,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 29, 1943, available at https://digitalnewspapers.org/.

Joel Campbell, “Brigham Hospital Helped War Effort,” Deseret News, February 10, 1992, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/209167/BRIGHAM-HOSPITAL-HELPED-WAR-EFFORT.html.

“Mosquitoes Sought to Prevent Spread of Malaria around Bushnell,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 28, 1943, available at https://digitalnewspapers.org.

Gordon Patterson, The Mosquito Crusades: A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).