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 a late-summer outbreak of yellow fever that quickly killed 68 of the 91 inhabitants. A local doctor concluded that some unspecified infectious agent had arrived in a package from New Orleans. 650 residents of Savannah, Georgia died from yellow fever in 1854. In 1858, St. Matthew's German Evangelical Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina, suffered 308 yellow fever deaths, reducing the congregation by half. A ship carrying persons infected with the virus arrived in Hampton Roads in southeastern Virginia in June 1855. The disease spread quickly through the community, eventually killing over 3,000 people, mostly residents of Norfolk and Portsmouth.