The drought also brought an end to the popular belief of Brazilian exceptionalism with regard to tropical miasms.[37] The dominant scientific discourse of the time stated that the climate of tropical countries made people lazy and unintelligent and allowed disease to fester.[37] Brazil did not have major epidemics of Smallpox, Yellow Fever, and Cholera between the time of initial contact of Portuguese explorers with the indigenous population (from which the indigenous contracted diseases to which they had no resistance) and the drought.[37] However, in 1878, epidemics swept Brazil.[2]