Yellow fever in Buenos Aires the mosquito "Aedes aegypti", which was responsible of transmitting Yellow Fever. A witness to the epidemic of 1871, named Mardoqueo Navarro, wrote on April 13 the following description in his diary: Since 1881, thanks to Cuban physician Carlos Finlay, it was known that the transmitting agent of Yellow Fever was mosquito "Aedes aegypti". Before that discovery, doctors attributed the cause of many epidemics to what they called "miasmas" floating in the air. Yellow Fever (or "black vomit", as it was called due to bleeding that occurs in the gastrointestinal) caused an epidemic in Buenos Aires in 1852. However, by a
History of yellow fever The entire Mississippi River Valley from St. Louis south was affected, and tens of thousands fled the stricken cities of New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Memphis. An estimated 120,000 cases of yellow fever resulted in some 20,000 deaths. Memphis suffered several epidemics during the 1870s, culminating in the 1878 epidemic (called the Saffron Scourge of 1878), with more than 5,000 fatalities in the city. Some contemporary accounts said that commercial interests had prevented the rapid reporting of the outbreak of the epidemic, increasing the total number of deaths. People still did not understand how the disease developed or was transmitted, and