Yellow fever known as "mosquito inspectors" fiercely worked to combat yellow fever throughout Rio by spraying, exterminating rats, improving drainage, and destroying unsanitary housing. Ultimately, the city's sanitation and renovation campaigns reshaped Rio de Janeiro's neighborhoods. Its poor residents were pushed from city centers to Rio's suburbs, or to towns found in the outskirts of the city. In later years, Rio's most impoverished inhabitants would come to reside in "favelas". During 1920–23, the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board undertook an expensive and successful yellow fever eradication campaign in Mexico. The IHB gained the respect of Mexico’s federal government because of the success.
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