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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedFred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme
Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm
Most houses are without roofs. They are just a square of dirty earth. In those courtyards and behind the doors of these hovels were found whole families lying on the floor; some were just too weakened by illness to get up and others were lying doubled up shaking from head to foot with their teeth chattering and their violently trembling hands trying in vain to draw some dirty rags around them for warmth. They were in the middle of the malaria crisis. There was illness in every house. There was hardly a house which had not had its dead and those who were left were living skeletons, their old clothing in rags, their limbs swollen from undernourishment and too weak to go into the fields to work or even to get food.
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It must have seemed to Soper that the ground had shifted beneath his feet-that the absolutes that governed his life, that countenanced even the most extreme of measures in the fight against disease, had suddenly and bewilderingly been set aside. "I was on several groups who evaluated malaria-eradication programs in some of the Central American countries and elsewhere," Geoffrey Jeffery recalls. "Several times we came back with the answer that with the present technology and effort it wasn't going to work. Well, that didn't suit Soper very much. He harangued us. We shouldn't be saying things like that!" Wilbur Downs, a physician who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico in the fifties, used to tell of a meeting with Soper and officials of the Mexican government about the eradication of malaria in that country. Soper had come down from Washington, and amid excited talk of ending malaria forever Downs pointed out that there were serious obstacles to eradication-among them the hastened decomposition and absorption of DDT by the clays forming adobe walls. It was all too much for Soper. This was the kind of talk that was impeding eradication-the doubting, the equivocation, the incompetence, the elevation of songbirds over human life. In the middle of the meeting, Soper-ramrod straight, eyes afire-strode over to Downs, put both his hands around his neck, and began to shake.
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