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
1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic vector of the 1793 plague in Philadelphia (and other Atlantic ports) was the British merchant ship "Hankey", which had fled the West African colony of Bolama (an island off West Africa, present day Guinea-Bissau) the previous November, trailing yellow fever at every port of call in the Caribbean and eastern Atlantic seaboard. See: "The Ship of Death: The Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World". After two weeks and an increasing number of fever cases, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a doctor's apprentice during the city's 1762 yellow fever epidemic, saw the pattern; he recognized that yellow fever had returned. Rush alerted his