The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The carrier of yellow fever, it had been determined, was the small, quiet, silvery household mosquito known as Stegomyia fasciata, exactly as the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had announced years earlier. As is presently known there are no fewer than 2,500 different species of mosquito (rather than 800-odd, as Finlay believed), and these belong to three important genera: Culex, Anopheles, and Aëdes. The Culex group includes the ordinary gray household mosquito found in northern latitudes (Culex pipiens pipiens). The Anopheles are the only known carriers of malaria and also transmit encephalitis, or sleeping sickness. The Aëdes aegypti is Stegomyia fasciata, as it was then called, the yellow-fever mosquito.