Year: 1883. Just forty-eight miles of digging and a canal will connect the Atlantic and Pacific! Got your sleeves rolled up yet?

Wait a minute. You don’t want to be digging the Panama Canal this year. There’s one good reason. Bugs. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Panama’s mosquitos carried two nasty diseases: yellow fever and malaria. The French workers didn’t know that bugs carried diseases. They didn’t know how to protect themselves. In 1883, there was a yellow fever outbreak among canal workers. Their skin turned yellow. That meant their livers had stopped working. Four hundred workers died of this disease. Many more died of malaria and other illnesses.

The French workers had to go home. Construction stopped. Then in 1901, the Americans came. They cleared land with dynamite. They dug with new steam shovels. While they slogged through the Panama mud, their chief medical officer Colonel William C. Gorgas discovered that it was indeed bugs that carried the diseases that sickened workers. He ordered chemicals to kill insects. The bugs died, and the U.S. workers survived. The American workers started to live in cleaner places. They built schools, towns, and hospitals. Their spirits soared.

We are better off today because of the hard work of people a century ago. The first boat passed through the Panama Canal in 1914. No thanks to the bugs!