Yellow fever was the first illness shown to be transmissible by filtered human serum and transmitted by mosquitoes, by Walter Reed around 1900. The positive-sense, single-stranded RNA is around 11,000 nucleotides long and has a single open reading frame encoding a polyprotein. Host proteases cut this polyprotein into three structural (C, prM, E) and seven nonstructural proteins (NS1, NS2A, NS2B, NS3, NS4A, NS4B, NS5); the enumeration corresponds to the arrangement of the protein coding genes in the genome. Minimal yellow fever virus (YFV) 3'UTR region is required for stalling of the host 5'-3' exonuclease XRN1. The UTR contains PKS3 pseudoknot structure which
Yellow fever he had fully credited Dr. Finlay with the discovery of the yellow fever vector, and how it might be controlled. Reed often cited Finlay's papers in his own articles, and also credited him for the discovery in his personal correspondence. The acceptance of Finlay's work was one of the most important and far-reaching effects of the Walter Reed Commission of 1900. Applying methods first suggested by Finlay, the United States government and Army eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and later in Panama, allowing completion of the Panama Canal. While Reed built on the research of Finlay, historian François Delaporte notes