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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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But, of course, Fred Soper with modest ambitions would not be Fred Soper; his epic achievements arose from his fanaticism, his absolutism, his commitment to saving as many lives as possible in the shortest period of time. For all the talk of his misplaced ambition, there are few people in history to whom so many owe their lives. The Global Malaria Eradication Programme helped eliminate the disease from the developed world, and from many parts of the developing world. In a number of cases where the disease returned, it came back at a lower level than it had been in the prewar years, and even in those places where eradication made little headway the campaign sometimes left in place a public infrastructure that had not existed before. The problem was that Soper had raised expectations too high. He had said that the only acceptable outcome for Global Eradication was global eradication, and when that did not happen he was judged -and, most important, he judged himself-a failure. But isn't the urgency Soper felt just what is lacking in the reasonableness of our contemporary attitude-in our caution and thoughtfulness and restraint? In the wake of the failure of eradication, it was popular to say that truly effective malaria control would have to await the development of a public-health infrastructure in poorer countries. Soper's response was, invariably: What about now? In a letter to a friend, he snapped, "The delay in handling malaria until it can be done by local health units is needlessly sacrificing the generation now living." There is something to admire in that attitude; it is hard to look at the devastation wrought by H.I.V. and malaria and countless other diseases in the Third World and not conclude that what we need, more than anything, is someone who will marshal the troops send them house to house, monitor their every movement, direct their every success, and, should a day of indifference leave their shirts unsullied, send them packing. Toward the end of his life, Soper, who died in 1975, met with an old colleague, M. A. Farid, with whom he had fought gambiae in Egypt years before. "How do things go?" Soper began. "Bad!" Farid replied, for this was in the years when everyone had turned against Soper's vision. "Who will be our ally?" Soper asked. And Farid said simply, "Malaria," and Soper, he remembered, almost hugged him, because it was clear what Farid meant: Someday, when DDT is dead and buried, and the West wakes up to a world engulfed by malaria, we will think back on Fred Soper and wish we had another to take his place.

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Acknowledgment: This article appeared in The New Yorker, July 2, 2001, and is reprinted with the author's permission.

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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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