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
Yellow fever probably transferred to North and South America with the importation of slaves from Africa, part of the Columbian Exchange following European exploration and colonization. The first definitive outbreak of yellow fever in the New World was in 1647 on the island of Barbados. An outbreak was recorded by Spanish colonists in 1648 in the Yucatán Peninsula, where the indigenous Mayan people called the illness "xekik" ("blood vomit"). In 1685, Brazil suffered its first epidemic, in Recife. The first mention of the disease by the name "yellow fever" occurred in 1744. McNeill argues that the environmental and ecological disruption caused by