Live Mint | June 27, 2016
John McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires, explains that genetic analysis has confirmed that Aedes aegypti came to the Americas from Africa. “The likeliest hypothesis is that it crossed the Atlantic with one or several of the ships of the slave trade in the 16th or early 17th century,” McNeill wrote in an email.
McNeill, who is also a professor at Georgetown University, explained that the role of Aedes aegypti in yellow fever was hypothesized by a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, in the 1880s and confirmed by American medical researchers in 1900 (in Cuba).