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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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It was in this same period that Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," taking aim at the environmental consequences of DDT. "The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection," she wrote, alluding to the efforts of men like Soper, "but it has heard little of the other side of the story-the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts." There had already been "warnings," she wrote, of the problems created by pesticides:

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On Nissan Island in the South Pacific, for example, spraying had been carried on intensively during the Second World War, but was stopped when hostilities came to an end. Soon swarms of a malaria-carrying mosquito reinvaded the island. All of its predators had been killed off and there had not been time for new populations to become established. The way was therefore clear for a tremendous population explosion. Marshall Laird, who had described this incident, compares chemical control to a treadmill; once we have set foot on it we are unable to stop for fear of the consequences.

It is hard to read that passage and not feel the heat of Soper's indignation. He was familiar with "Silent Spring"-everyone in the malaria world was-and what was Carson saying? Of course the mosquitoes came back when DDT spraying stopped. The question was whether the mosquitoes were gone long enough to disrupt the cycle of malaria transmission. The whole point of eradication, to his mind, was that it got you off the treadmill: DDT was so effective that if you used it properly you could stop spraying and not fear the consequences. Hadn't that happened in places like Taiwan and Jamaica and Sardinia?

"Silent Spring" was concerned principally with the indiscriminate use of DDT for agricultural purposes; in the nineteen-fifties, it was being sprayed like water in the Western countryside, in an attempt to control pests like the gypsy moth and the spruce budworm. Not all of Carson's concerns about the health effects of DDT have stood the test of time-it has yet to be conclusively linked to human illness-but her larger point was justified: DDT was being used without concern for its environmental consequences. It must have galled Soper, however, to see how Carson effectively lumped the malaria warriors with those who used DDT for economic gain. Nowhere in "Silent Spring" did Carson acknowledge that the chemical she was excoriating as a menace had, in the two previous decades, been used by malariologists to save somewhere in the vicinity of ten million lives. Nor did she make it clear how judiciously the public-health community was using the chemical. By the late fifties, health experts weren't drenching fields and streams and poisoning groundwater and killing fish. They were leaving a microscopic film on the inside walls of houses; spraying every house in a country the size of Guyana, for example, requires no more DDT in a year than a large cotton farm does. Carson quoted a housewife from Hinsdale, Illinois, who wrote about the damage left by several years of DDT spraying against bark beetles: "The town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been on my shelf for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone too; the nesting population in the neighborhood seems to consist of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family. . . . 'Will they ever come back?' [the children] ask, and I do not have the answer." Carson then quoted a bird-lover from Alabama: "There was not a sound of the song of a bird. It was eerie, terrifying. What was man doing to our perfect and beautiful world?" But to Soper the world was neither perfect nor beautiful, and the question of what man could do to nature was less critical than what nature, unimpeded, could do to man. Here, from a well-thumbed page inserted in Soper's diaries, is a description of a town in Egypt during that country's gambiae invasion of 1943-a village in the grip of its own, very different, unnatural silence:

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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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