The Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires was a series of epidemics that took place in 1852, 1858, 1870 and 1871, the latter being a disaster that killed about 8% of Porteños: in a city where the daily death rate was less than 20, there were days that killed more than 500 people. The Yellow Fever would have come from Asunción, Paraguay, brought by Argentine soldiers returning from the war just fought in that country, having previously spread in the city of Corrientes. As its worst, Buenos Aires population was reduced to a third because of the exodus of those escaping the scourge.
Some of the main causes of the spread of this disease were the insufficient supply of drinking water, pollution of ground water by human waste, the warm and humid climate in summer, the overcrowding suffered by the black people and, since 1871, the overcrowding of the European immigrants who entered the country incessantly and without sanitary measures. Also, the saladeros (manufacturing establishments for producing salted and dried meat) polluted the Matanza River (south of the city limits), and the infected ditches full of debris which ran through the city encouraged the spread of 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:
Outbreaks of Yellow Fever before 1871
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 note addressed to practitioner Soler is known that outbreaks occurred even before that year. As for the 1870 epidemic, it would come from Brazil from merchant ship and caused 100 deaths.
The great epidemic of 1871
Background
At the end of 1870 there were large numbers of invalids registered in Asunción, whose populace lived in deplorable poverty. The Paraguayan War had just finished there and the Argentinian intervention began in early 1871, causing the Buenos Aires epidemic by the arrival of the first Argentinian veterans.
Also, in the city of Corrientes, with a population of 11,000 and the centre of communication and provision for the allied troops between December 1870 and June of the following year, 2000 people died of yellow fever. Most of the population fled. Other towns in the Corrientes Province suffered the punishment of the disease, such as San Luis del Palmar, Bella Vista and San Roque.
In 1871 the National Government convened in Buenos Aires, presided over by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, with Buenos Aires Province represented by Emilio Castro, and Narciso Martínez de Hoz presided over the municipal government.
The city, situated in a plain, had no drainage system nor running water. Hygiene was very precarious and there were many focuses of infection, such as the slums which lacked basic hygiene standards and were crammed with poor black or European immigrants, and the creeks, south of the city limits, which had become a sink for sewage and waste dumped by salting and slaughterhouses along their coasts. As it had no sewerage system, human waste collected in cesspools, which contaminated the ground water and hence the wells, one of the two major sources of the vital element for the majority of the populace. The other source was the Río de la Plata, from which they extracted water by carts, with no process of sanitisation.
The filth and waste were used for levelling the terrain and streets in a city growing rapidly, mainly due to the influx of migrants. The streets were very narrow and there were no avenues (the first to be constructed was the Avenida de Mayo, which opened in 1894). There were few plazas and almost no vegetation.
The first census of Argentina in 1869 registered 177,787 inhabitants in the City of Buenos Aires, of which 88,126 were foreigners, and of those 44,233 were Italian and 14,609 were Spanish. In addition there were over 19,000 urban dwellings, of which 2300 were made of wood or clay and straw.
In addition to the epidemic of yellow fever that we have mentioned, there were outbreaks of cholera in 1867 and 1868, which killed hundreds of people.