In June 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 19th century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana they began testing the radical theories of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. This production documents the heroic efforts of Reed, s medical team to verify Finlay's theory. Eventually their discovery enabled the United States to successfully eradicate the disease among workers constructing the Panama Canal, making possible the completion of one of the most strategic waterways in the world. When yellow ever struck New Orleans in 1905, federal public health officials launched an aggressive mosquito eradication campaign and successfully ended the epidemic. It was the last yellow fever outbreak in the United States, and the first major public health triumph of the 20th century.