PANAMA—When the U.S.-built Panama Canal opened on Aug. 15, 1914, some newspapers called it Western civilization’s greatest triumph. Last month, inching through a canal lock on a ship with about a foot of room on either side, I could see why.

Canal walls seemed familiar in some ways, featuring subway tiles like those of the New York underground, but they are as spectacular as the Great Wall of China, and maybe more so because Americans engineered them in a hot jungle flush with snakes, scorpions, and yellow fever mosquitoes.

But here’s the irony: As the press celebrated man’s god-like engineering skill, the rebellion against God led by Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud was already underway, and the world war that augured the downfall of Western civilization was starting its third week.

One month from now, on June 26, a $7 billion expansion of the Panama Canal is scheduled to open. Ships as long as three football fields will push through it. We’ll again see a celebration of man’s technical prowess.

But here’s the new irony. This spring the “Panama Papers” showed how leaders of many countries misused billions of dollars entrusted to them. This spring Panama, along with Brazil, had the first documented microcephaly cases linked to the Zika virus, which leaves babies with unusually small heads and without part of their brains. We can build higher and stronger, but the corruption of man and nature resulting from original sin always brings us low.

This story has several threads. One (spun out in our sidebar) concerns Zika, which is devastating thousands of families in Central and South America and will take billions from the economies of their countries. It’s already affecting the lives of missionaries such as Matt and Mindy Hedspeth, who moved to Panama in 2008 and founded an orphanage here: They are “praying and asking the Lord to protect us all.” Zika may spread through the southern United States as well, unless we take aggressive action against the mosquitoes that carry the virus.

The press is likely to miss an even more interesting story, because it involves connecting several dots from different decades. Dot 1: Scientists and doctors in the 19th century thought yellow fever arose from “miasma,” the unhealthy night air wafting out of marshy places or filthy slums. They held to that belief as firmly as their counterparts today stick to theories of global warming and macroevolution.

Dot 2: The reality was different, since a particular species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, was the culprit in spreading yellow fever throughout Panama in the 1880s. A. aegypti killed thousands of French workers and destroyed that country’s decadelong attempt to build a canal through 50 miles of ridges and mountains that separate the Atlantic and Pacific here.

Moving to the 20th century, Dot 3: When the United States took over the building effort, American leaders also blamed yellow fever—they called it Yellow Jack—on miasma rather than mosquitoes. After a series of deaths, Yellow Jack panic in 1905 prompted three-fourths of Americans in Panama to flee the country.

Dot 4: Just when the U.S. effort seemed doomed, an army doctor known as a Christian and willing to buck conventional wisdom went to war against A. aegypti and beat it in a $30 million effort.

And here’s the 21st century’s Dot 5: The mosquito that mainly carries Zika today is none other than our old enemy, A. aegypti—but to this point we’re waging only a halfhearted effort against it.

THE HERO OF THIS STORY IS A MILITARY DOCTOR, William Crawford Gorgas, who had survived Yellow Jack when stationed at Fort Brown at the southernmost tip of Texas. His soon-to-be-wife Marie also caught the disease: They convalesced together and fell in love. Marie later wrote, “It would be untrue to say Yellow Jack was the best man at our wedding—but it would be perfectly true to say that in a sense he was an usher.”

David McCullough, in his readable history The Path Between the Seas, notes, “Classmates at the Bellevue Medical College in New York would remember ‘Billy’ Gorgas as a devout Christian … and ‘imperturbable.’” Since Yellow Jack survivors have immunity to it thereafter, Gorgas asked for and often received postings to places where the disease ravaged cities.

He knew “miasma” settled science and was frustrated to see that cleanup campaigns often didn’t work. For example, when U.S. soldiers sent to Cuba for the Spanish-American War were dying of the disease, he led a brilliant cleanup-Havana campaign which had officials toasting his success—until one of the city’s worst Yellow Jack epidemics hit.

(Oddly, Gorgas owed his existence to the prevailing theory: His mother in 1853 had moved from the “miasma” of Mobile, Ala., to high ground and there met her future husband. Oddly, the doctor who delivered him, Joseph C. Nott, was probably the only American in the 19th century to publish a paper challenging the “miasma” theory. He bizarrely suggested an insect or animal origin for the disease. Everyone scoffed at this crackpot notion.)

Gorgas in Havana in 1898 became friends with a Cuban doctor, Carlos Findlay, who for 17 years had observed that people got Yellow Jack when Aedes aegypti (at that time often called Stegomyia) bit them. But Findlay’s theory seemed easy to disprove: Some bitten people became sick, but most did not. Gorgas first thought Findlay wrong: “I was constantly bringing to his notice instances in the past which could not be accounted for on the mosquito theory.”

After the Havana cleanup failed, Gorgas and another desperate doctor, Walter Reed, subjected Findlay’s theory to careful experimentation. They learned something strange but true: Only the female A. aegypti spread the disease, and only if she bit and swallowed the blood of a yellow fever patient during the first three days after he became ill, and only if she bit someone else at least 12 days later—not four, not eight, but 12.

Gorgas and Reed also dramatically knocked down the miasma/filth theory by having volunteers sleep for a week in pajamas and on mattresses covered with the noxious excretions of yellow fever sufferers. The volunteers vomited—but not one died.

Gorgas and Reed (who later gave his name to Washington’s famous Army hospital) then studied the habits of the murderer. It turned out that A. aegypti never traveled more than 200 yards from the place of its birth and only laid eggs in a man-made vessel that contained fresh water. The cure presented itself: To stop Yellow Jack epidemics, destroy the breeding places.

When Gorgas in 1904 became chief medical officer for the huge project of building the Panama Canal, he visited the beautiful hospital France had built in its aborted canal effort. He saw the French way to keep ants from crawling up the legs of hospital beds: Set each leg in a little cup of fresh water. He saw the hospital’s beautiful grounds: To protect several thousand tropical plants from ants chewing their leaves, the French had set each plant in a pottery ring filled with fresh water.

Gorgas then commented wryly, “A more perfect arrangement for the propagation of yellow fever could not have been adopted if the authorities had had this object in view.”

Malaria was also a huge problem. Its fatality rate was lower than Yellow Jack’s, but survivors did not gain immunity: Malaria is the anti-gift that keeps on giving. Between Yellow Jack and malaria, 85 percent of canal workers were hospitalized. To fight both diseases, Gorgas wanted thousands of workers to fumigate every private home in Panama: They were to empty pools of standing water, spray with oil all cesspools and drains, and put wire mesh on windows and doors.

That’s what Gorgas requested, but U.S. authorities, committed to settled science’s miasma theory, said no. Rear Admiral John G. Walker, chairman of the Canal Commission, flatly informed Gorgas that he was wrong. The next chairman, Theodore Shonts, with similar faith in the scientific consensus, also said the problem was filth, not a little Aedes. Gorgas received for his anti-Aedes campaign only 5 percent of what he asked for. Workers kept dying.

The roadblock remained until Alexander Lambert, Theodore Roosevelt’s personal physician, told the president: “If you fall back on the old methods you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back Gorgas you will get your canal.” Roosevelt dumped the miasma theory and got Gorgas what he asked for: 120 tons of pyrethrum powder, 300 tons of sulfur, 50,000 gallons of kerosene oil per month, 8,500 garbage cans/buckets/brooms/scrub brushes—and workers to carry on the war.

In the largest public health project in world history to that time, those workers killed mosquitoes by fumigating houses. They put screens on windows of rooms with patients, so mosquitoes could not bite them and spread the disease to others. They put lids on cisterns. They poured oil on any standing water to smother the mosquito larvae. They fined residents with larvae in their homes.

The war succeeded. The canal project’s last yellow fever victim died in November 1906. Gorgas temporarily became famous. Journalists asked why he was willing to fight settled science and keep fighting. His wife Marie said he “manifested two traits that might at first seem antagonistic—a genuine feeling for religion and a zest for the military life.” Songs like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” were real to him. He idolized his father, who had been a Confederate general. He believed apparently lost causes are worth fighting for.

Once the health war ended, the focus became engineering. Even today, a trip through the canal shows what engineers made in God’s image can do with the raw materials He supplies. Locks function like elevators, moving huge ships up and down: They raise the vessels 85 feet from the Atlantic so they can cross the Continental Divide, then lower them to the Pacific.

A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL, PANAMA. That famous palindrome celebrates Theodore Roosevelt, who made the right executive decision, but Gorgas truly was the man with the plan on the scene. For several decades Americans remembered his feat: Yellow Jack became the name of a 1934 Broadway play in which Jimmy Stewart had his first dramatic role.

Few Americans today remember Gorgas. But we need his spirit now, because the mosquito species he fought, Aedes aegypti, is the primary carrier of the Zika virus. Those mosquitoes still do not venture more than 200 yards from their birthplaces. We can beat them, and Gorgas taught us how. Embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in January, “We need to eliminate all standing water spots where Aedes lives and reproduces.”

A big problem in accomplishing that: Poorer cities often do not have good water systems, so residents collect rainwater in buckets for daily use. They resist getting rid of standing water in the same way affluent Americans would not want their faucets turned off. But the Gorgas solution—lids, oil, fines—would still work.

One complication: At the end of April researchers announced they had detected the Zika virus in a second species, Aedes albopictus. The species ranges into the northern half of the United States—Aedes aegypti is a southern curse—and can reproduce in a variety of environments. The good news of sorts is that albopictus stays on one human or warm-blooded animal until it has finished its blood meal, unlike aegypti, which promiscuously jumps from person to person, often biting ankles, and thus spreads infection widely. So aegypti still is the overwhelming threat, and to fight it we have two weapons (and maybe four) Gorgas did not have.

One is DDT, which the National Academy of Sciences in 1970 said had “prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria.” The following year the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency banned its use in the United States, even though seven months of investigative hearings gave DDT’s careful use a clean bill of health in regard to both humans and animals. Smartly targeted use today could save many lives.

We also have a second weapon: genetic engineering, a fearful concept when applied to humans but appropriate for mosquitoes. A British company has introduced among male Aedes aegypti a mutation that makes their offspring die before they reach murderous maturity. Brazil has improved the process, and it has made a difference in the city of Piracicaba. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now approved field testing of the mosquitoes in one small area of south Florida: The government should fast-track that process.

A third potential solution is a vaccine, but that looks to be slow in coming, as is a fourth possibility: Researchers have learned that injecting A. aegypti mosquito eggs with a bacterium, Wolbachia, makes the adult mosquitoes Zika-resistant. If officials release the bacterium carriers into Aedes areas, the newcomers will breed and their descendants could replace the Zika-carriers.

Meanwhile, worldviews have consequences. Federal researchers are working with companies to develop a test to determine quickly whether a pregnant woman has contracted Zika. Even though at that point we still would not know the effect on that particular child, the next piece of government advice will clearly be: Get an abortion. That’s a horrible “solution,” especially since we know the way to a good one: Abort Aedes.

Zika and missions

Missionaries often operate like New York City firefighters. They rush in as others rush out. But what about their unborn children?

This winter and spring Carrie Himes was pregnant in northeastern Brazil, epicenter of the Zika virus outbreak that’s been linked with microcephaly in unborn babies, so ultrasounds were causes for suspense.

In February she wrote: “We had another ultrasound done today at 30 weeks. Our doctors have assured us that Lucas’ brain development and head size are normal, and that he is very healthy. We … use precautions against mosquito bites as recommended by the CDC, but are confident that God is in control of all things!” Lucas was born on April 18, and on April 30 Himes reported that he was “healthy and happy.” Never were statistics so important: “All his measurements were taken the day after he was born and are in metric: weight: 2.725 kg; length: 51.5 cm; head circumference: 33 cm.” Perfect.

Will there be more happy births or more sad ones? Earlier this year some doubted the Zika-microcephaly connection, but Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden said last month: “There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly. … Never before in history has there been a situation where a bite from a mosquito can result in a devastating malformation.” All infants with microcephaly have small heads and some brain abnormalities, but Zika damage is particularly severe: The virus eats away parts of the brain that enable thought and vision, and stops the growth of other parts.

Medical authorities in Brazil and other Latin American countries are now discussing the long-term question of caring for infants with “Congenital Zika Syndrome.” Some doctors say adults are also at risk and could contract via Zika a nerve disorder, Guillain-Barré syndrome—but that is unproven. Some missionaries, like Joe Boyd in Colombia, have come down with the virus and had a tremendous urge to itch, but nothing worse. —M.O.